


L'Appel du Vide

by CryingKilljoy



Series: The Nocebo Effect [3]
Category: Bandom, Panic! at the Disco
Genre: BoyxBoy, F/F, France (Country), French Characters, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-21
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-06-02 06:12:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 25
Words: 40,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6554167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CryingKilljoy/pseuds/CryingKilljoy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>L'appel du vide: "the call of the void", the demons who tell you it could all be over.<br/>Dallon Weekes tried to kill himself -- he doesn't think it's a big deal, seeing as the amnesia swept over him before he could register where he was.<br/>He doesn't have any memories, and at first, Dallon views that as a pleasant concept...until Brendon Urie returns, a disheveled mess with pockets packed with letters to his suicidal boyfriend that doesn't remember him.<br/>It's just psychology.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Dallon's Point of View**

There is nothing, just as there has always been, but this time it's a vivid nothing, like I've seen it before but hidden from it because I was scared. I should be scared, in fact, though I'm oddly interested in the haze that's settled over my vision like dust settles over an old mirror, and that mirror must be me, for I am too old to be narrating the story of a seventeen year-old boy, but this seventeen year-old boy has just committed suicide, and this must be heaven, if it exists anyway.

I'm finding myself blurred in atheism and believing that there is a Hell to punish me for the sins I've whisked into existence, and perhaps it's only exclusive to me, because I'm sure that I've sinned far too much to slide by with impunity. Other people have done nothing when their flaws are placed on a pedestal chaining their legs to its marble, and they are explicitly innocent when one glances at my dirtied face stained crimson by my own blood and the blood manifesting in the nightmares of those I tortured with my absence, but I digress. This is becoming too inappropriate for those who deem themselves capturers of air to shove down their throats just as I shoved Tums down my throat and died, but alas, I did not, because I'm speaking in riddles this very moment to hide the fact that I have no idea where the hell I am.

Anyway, the reason I consider myself so old is not because I have creased my skin with wrinkles from excessive worrying or can barely stand up straight or play a weekly game of bingo with the local elderlies every Friday night, but because I have seen too many monstrous things to regard myself as a babe innocuous of any crime. I have matured beyond compare, and my voice now withers with each breath I seize to expel words that mean nothing, because I'm dead, or at least I should be, and no one listens to the dead when they cry for mercy or deliverance or for the living to stop worshiping them by clearing their faults like they clear their windows to see precisely, yet they never see precisely when it comes to the fallen victims decaying in the dirt that they tend to because once again they didn't listen to the dead when they tell them that this is all just an unnecessary surplus to soothe a guilty conscience shared pandemically by the breathing and beating and pulsing.

I have always abhorred being among that group of people who thinks their devotion to people that cannot hear them is the perfect solution to their lack of a moral compass. They’re striving to achieve things that they cannot have, and I was praying atheistically that I would be resigned to the grave so that I would never witness this pettiness ever again, as my lids will be crisped against the chill of the dirt and the seeds and the cracking wood of my coffin, but that is not the case for me right now, and I have no clue why that is.

I'm pretty sure I'm waking up in a hospital room, and I am not gone as I had expected. My pills hadn’t worked. My heart is still shuddering in its cage of lungs blood and and matter that still exists, and I can breathe again.

This is no blessing, for I want so desperately to be gone, but I am not gone, and it suddenly strikes me that I hurt people over this. My own suicidal thoughts harmed the one I loved the very most, whose name or face I do not know. They did harm this one, and there’s no denying it, or else a proponent of the opposite will be labeled a fool. My insecurities were everything that killed me with that sweet dagger of poison, but still I am not dead. _Why_ am I not dead? Why do I, of all people, deserve to torment others with my emptiness like this? How is any of this fair?

It’s not, none of it, because the space that I consume should not affect other people as it so ruthlessly has, and the ones that I loved should not have to suffer through _my_ choices that were poorly made and ridden with teen angst and trivial woes, and the doctors at this hospital I presume that I’m in should not have to save me, for I do not wish to survive, and they need not waste their glorious supplies on an inconsolably bratty kid like me.

So to save the doctors as they might’ve saved me, I want to go back, go back to that time where I was jumbled in a haze of bright lights and fancy colors and all the wonders I could never see as an ordinary mortal remaining to go about their day with the misconception that what they do somehow means something to the universe. I want to feel the stray clumps of mud in my coffin sifted in between my frozen fingers. I want to feel my lips paint a sickly blue and a sickly white over a beautiful red, want to feel the tenderness of an ebony suit too decadent for decay in its hand-washed state, want to feel like my problems are no longer significant six feet under the ground, want to feel like my issues never thrived off of my anxieties and not once call myself the fool I call others for desiring the same prospects.

If no one has caught this, I am the most blatant example of a hypocrite you could ever discover on this planet. I am a liar and blame others for miscommunication. I am the knock you hear at your window before I flee because I’m a fucking _coward_ and name others the same to protect my starving ego. I’m just searching for evidence to convict people that stuck by me as I most likely never would for them, and I’ve fucking wrecked my life.

However, this life should be over. Those Tums should have maneuvered their calcium carbonate across the seas of scarlet dictators correctly, should have killed me then and there. These doctors should have left me alone, yet they’re struggling to electrify my molding body that never wanted to escape my mother’s womb in the first place. I wish I could stay inside that chamber of gestation and never come out, because the world is terrifying, and I am afraid. I am _afraid_ , and I am the coward of whom I speak so negatively, and I am my own scapegoat when I need to be, because no one else elects to be around me when all I want to do is release my anger onto something who will provide me with a reaction, but that’s abusive, and I shouldn’t do it. I shouldn’t _be here_ , either, but I am, and I hate everything that made it this way, that kept me alive, that shot energy into my pulse, that told me it’s such a relief that I’m alive, that became more of a liar than I ever was.

I dread liars, but I am one, so I guess dreading myself is what commanded me to devour those tablets like I was a lion who hadn’t hunted in three days and is absolutely miserable, but in three days I can be resurrected like Jesus with the magic of those calcium carbonate pills, except it’s an inverted scenario where my resurrection is actually my death and my supporters don’t praise my return because I never had supporters at all.

I’m lonely as fuck, and I’m dead as fuck, and I’m mourned as fuck by someone I don’t even know but suspect is weeping over the grave that I most definitely don’t possess yet, because I’m still fucking alive in a hospital room whose setting I cannot decipher through bleared vision and heavy drugs to sustain the life that I have always despised maintaining throughout seventeen dreary years of existing and prolonged decades of mental aging and nothing to rock me to sleep, or nothing that I can remember.

It’s not so much that I _don’t_ want to remember, just that I’m fearful of the pain to be derived from remembering anecdotes that prompted me to leave the person of whom I currently have no memory, only a fucking outline that doesn’t mean shit to me, doesn’t ask me if I want this person’s appearance in the life that’s been fucking spurred back into _fucking_ reality without my proper consent, but if I’m to be trudging through even more decades of agony, then I demand the companionship of someone to trudge through them with me, but that someone I grope my hands around blindly is unfamiliar to me in the sense that I know nothing about him, but I know his shadow like I know words on the tip of my tongue — isolated but feasible, just out of my reach, craved as wholly as I crave the sweet release of death.

I need this man, and I’ll make it my duty to find him.

~~~~~

**A/N: bruh**

**yes, this is dual narrative, yes, you can read l'esprit d'escalier simultaneously, yes, I will emotionally wreck you, yes, you can feel free to comment because I'm always a slut for comments, yes, ted cruz is the zodiac killer, YES I HAVE NO LIFE AND BRING YOU HOMO YOU'RE WELCOME**

**aesthetic: guitar and bass lines in Arctic Monkeys' songs**

**~Dakota**

 


	2. I mindfuck because I can't be trusted

It’s been so long since the beloved Dallon Weekes, my irreplaceable masterpiece, committed suicide without so much as a fucking warning — at least a month, maybe more. I wrote to him every single one of those days, yet I’ve lost track of the sum. You’d think a boyfriend would remember when the most important person in his life no longer _possessed_ a life, but the math is too tiring for me when all of this shit is assaulting me from every side, and I’ve never been very skilled at plotting dates, but I at least know that it’s been a prolonged while that I’ve barely endured without crumbling myself.

And at least three fourths of that time was me spending so long trying to convince myself that Dallon would be back, that Dallon would be right around the corner in the living room with a paintbrush in his hand as always, but every single time I would turn around and he wouldn’t be here, and so many sobs would cling to my throat, and my house would no longer smell of peppermint, and I would be alone.

I should be able to survive this, as this was my situation in middle school, because Kara didn’t really amount to anything in her level of tenderness towards my dilemmas with her acute disillusioned outlook towards life (I think she called it her emo phase, but now she looks back and cringes on it profusely when it unwelcomingly pops into her brain like a pimple on an adolescent’s face), so I was forced to figure out how to solve my own problems with little to no help, including little to no help from Ryan Ross, who was supposed to be my emotional lifeline as my friend but isn’t here even now when I need it most, because this is permanent. This isn’t like being bullied, where you know the bullies will receive their dose of karma while you watch them smolder in the hellfire they sparked and never pity them because it’s the result of the actions they willingly executed, but Dallon isn’t a bully. He’s the opposite, actually — _he_ was bullied, by Spencer Smith and his idiots of a posse, and he didn’t deserve the malevolent karma of depression and suicide as an effect.

In my pondering, I surmise that karma materializes in different archetypes for everyone. For example, the latently terrified are struck with immediate danger, whereas the hopeless are met with everlasting mental illness to steal any last bits of faith they may have stored inside their barred heart. Spencer is of the former, and Dallon and I are of the latter. We’re all weak, but the difference between us and them is that we’ve known since the beginning that we’re screwed.

However, I’ve always been so impressionable to the point where even if I know there’s no chance for me, I’m still bombarded as much as the foolish. In this relationship between Dallon and me, I was the fragile one, and he was the person who tucked me into a package with care so that I wouldn’t be harmed, and while others may think that this is a beautiful metaphor of how much we loved each other, in truth it is actually acknowledging that a packer’s job is to send things away.

That must’ve been my karma, as if I hadn’t experienced enough of that drive already, because if I am of the latter group, that means I am dealt lifelong mental afflictions into my playing hand, but it’s like a dead card, because there’s no possible way I could use it to my advantage. It’s a faulty card for my circumstances, and it’s forever clasped in between my thumbs, but I’m an integrous enough person that I wouldn’t play the card and pass it on to others. That’s the disparity between Spencer and me — he’s willing to shove mental illness onto others in the form of bullying just to rid himself of it, but I will tote it in my handy bag of brain terror and suffer in the silence I chose to keep.

Am I a good person? Should I win freedom from this mental illness? Should I have been chained to it in the first place? I just don’t know these things about myself, and Dallon isn’t here to assure me of the answer, though he’s probably sugarcoat it anyway. Or maybe he’d be honest, because he’s lied enough to me already and doesn’t need another fiber on this web of lies we’ve fabricated throughout the weeks we’ve known each other.

In fact, that web of lies has been expanding even after Dallon’s reckless suicide that left me clueless as to how I’d carry on, but I did, but it was only through misconceptions and false hope. I said he would be back, but no one returns from suicide unless they never really killed themselves at all, and Dallon is not the type to stage a fake death, especially because he was so fucking wearied by simply existing. He _could_ be alive, though. This might be a psychological experiment, but so was the placebo effect that ushered him to his suicide. I’m furnished with fallacy, and I’m somehow okay with that, too, because I feel like I need a bit of dreaming in a life that’s usually so pragmatic, and when I try to sleep, try to rest my head on a pillow that’s too rock solid for my taste, I never can drift into fantasy, but when I do, it’s just black and dark and dreamless, and I’ve never maintained faith in that or in my world.

I wish I could dream, wish I could assemble worlds from scratch just with the power of my mind, wish I could refresh myself while I enjoy a play I myself have created, but I can’t do any of those for whatever illogical reason, and I presume that transfers over to my gloomy and self-deprecating reality. Maybe I’ve attempted dreaming before but despised it. Maybe I’ve just forgotten.

I’ve forgotten a lot of things lately. Kara has told me numerous times to buy milk at the grocery store, though I hate milk, so that’s probably why it escaped me. I am now unable to locate things that would come so easily to me before, and I spend a half an hour at a time merely searching for the missing item, usually never finding them at all because I give up like always. I don’t know which days things occur, like when the trash man visits or when my school serves ice cream after hours. I’ve forgotten so much, and I’m somewhat fine with that notion, because the way I see it, I’m simply making space in my brain for other, more important facts that I still probably won’t ever need in my career, but with some luck nothing about Dallon has swiped itself from my gripping mind, and I don’t know if that’s how I really want it, because on one hand he fucked me up so badly to the verge of tears every second I waste thinking about him and his hair and his scarves that I may or may not have a kink for pulling towards me to kiss him, but on the other hand he’s the love of my life and remains to be, and to forget him would be forgetting a part of my own soul. I’m too hollow from middle school to carve myself out again, so I fervidly require every scrap Dallon Weekes, every scrap that isn’t here, every scrap that is dead and lifeless and shoved into a cage by “placebo” pills, every scrap that I cannot have, despite my earnest hunger for it.

I guess that’s fair, though, because we as humans can’t have everything we wish for, but I at least thought that I could have Dallon, life and all. I could’ve helped him through his depression. After all, I did it for myself, so what’s to say that I can’t do it for him? I could’ve been the best boyfriend in the history of the world if he would’ve allowed me knowledge of what was plaguing him, because I realize that I can’t fix depression entirely, but I could’ve imposed coping methods and cuddling and everything that Dallon would need, and I’d benefit from it, too. It would be perfect, like a symbiotic cycle of water from tears and giggles from lungs practically bursting with elation, and everything would be okay.

On the contrary, everything is _not_ okay, because my friend is dead, and I’m wilting on the dismal inside, and nothing in life feels correct anymore, like it’s tilted to the side and is flopping back and forth like a seesaw bringing me sickness but not a paper bag, and I’m finding that the fresh aroma of vomit on my clothes isn’t nearly as pungent as the lack of peppermint aroma in my house that was such a comfort to me when Dallon was here, but now when I occasionally sense it on random items like my blankets and the bathroom and my t-shirts, it’s a mess I have to clean up, grievance a pest for an already soggy mop in the hands of someone who really doesn’t want to be here but is forced to, and I can only assume that I’ll be forced into doing a lot more things down the road, and Dallon can’t protect me from them.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: idk what this was lmao
> 
> aesthetic: squads of boys in boarding schools *cough* the dead poets society
> 
> ~Deadkotaetsociety


	3. NOOO MUH BBY

Well I’ve done it, and I’ve done it with only minor problems. I’ve escaped from the hospital with only a few concerned stares, some sympathetic for my lost cause of a personality (which is growing older and older by the day until it fades into nonexistence, because right now I’m still as shaken up as the old Dallon Weekes always was), some the artificial smiles one would distribute amongst pedestrians walking past them on the street, some condemning me after realizing that the most common reasons for a teenager such as myself to be in a hospital is for a car crash and a suicide attempt, both of which are frowned upon in society mostly by the old people who think all we millennials do is party and wreck everything they “strived to achieve for us youngins”.

To be quite fair, it’s not like this is really my fault. Not the current Dallon Weekes anyway, because the old Dallon Weekes was suicidal and crazed and hell bent on killing himself, and I understand that and perhaps understand _why_ he was that kind of person, but I’m nevertheless not that guy anymore. I’ve changed for the better, and I’m happier, though flavored by a ghastly amnesia that attacks the core of my personality, who I am, my identity, but still I’m not the Dallon Weekes who bordered on insanity just to dip his feet into its acid pool for laughs and then eventually splashed into its murky depths by accident (or maybe not so much on accident, as he was absolutely adoring the life of a headcase).

I only know what the nurses told me — my name is Dallon Weekes, I am seventeen years old, I am from Bordeaux, France, and they are sincerely sorry that I discovered myself in their clutches all alone, without any memory of why I visited this location in the first place, as if it could’ve been a simple mistake that mutated into a cause for me to stay there. They didn’t tell me what it was that I did that landed me into this far too sterile facility, though, and wondering why has consumed my thought process from the hospital and down the sidewalk. Maybe they feared what would happen if I found, probably imagining me doing it again because I liked the idea.

If I can predict what transpired in the lives of the people who knew me, repeating that cycle is not something I wish to evoke, because if I’m in pain and I haven’t the slightest clue what I actually did, then I can only assume that other people’s experiences were way more monstrous than mine. God, what I menace I am to make people suffer like that. I don’t deserve to put others around me through agony just because of my own stupid mistakes, my own stupid suicidal tendencies.

No, I am not certain that the old Dallon attempted to make a move on his life, take it and shove it into a coffin along with his body, but what else could it be? If the nurses were so worried about me finding out what I really did, then it couldn’t be a car crash. What kind of idiot purposely enacts a car crash if it’s not suicide, not the suicide that I must’ve committed but failed in following through? It has to be suicide, and it has to be weak, because I don’t feel different, just out of my skin, estranged like I’ve most definitely always been, and this tingly feeling rupturing my bones is merely a common nuisance, right? I should be used to it, should be accustomed to disfigurement in my own body, right?

Even so, the sensation is still weird and gross and makes me feel out of place in an area where I should be the most at home, and that phenomenon carries with me down the street with a bottle of sparkling grape juice slowly slipping from my trembling fingers while my focus is trained on the crackers in my alternate set of fingers as they’re transported to the house of a person about whom I do not know a single detail and am somewhat scared to find out, but the nurses at the hospital said that this man is the one who discovered my body lying inert on the pavement somewhere and is now my guardian, so I figured it would be nice to bring him a snack for his efforts, however terrified I am.

This street I’m strolling down is perhaps as daunting as a monster under a child’s bed, because I know nothing about my environment due to my fucking amnesia that is starting to really piss me off due to my intolerance for a mild bit of frustration all of the sudden, as what is occurring around me is one to situate me in such a shock, and I fucking abhor the feeling just as much as I abhor the rattling of my bones, and I’m just really fucking afraid of what’s happening around me. The birds swarming around my head are singing cheerfully, but to me it sounds like the screeching of an amateur violinist furnishing the hall in pandemonium. The bushes just look as malevolent as a villain in a movie, like they’re anticipating the perfect moment where they can jump towards me for a kill. The street signs make no sense like they should, so I’m merely meandering around the neighborhood with only the map and the printed directions in my hand to guide me, checked up and down intermittently with anxious eyes (blue jay pops into my head for some deluded reason) so I don’t get lost like I was lost before now and then shoved my present self into these circumstances.

I’m sure the man who viewed my lifeless body is a nice enough person (though he might as well be locked up in a contained facility after seeing what horrors I did to myself — you don’t forget that kind of shit, except I did, apparently), but I’m still nervous as hell. What if he doesn’t like me? What if I don’t like _him_? What if he’s abusive? I’ve had enough abuse in my life from what I can tell, primarily from my own brain, so I’d rather not be under the “protection” of an alcoholic beater that only saved me from suicide because he was scouring for a reward that he probably didn’t receive.

 _Calm yourself down, Dallon. This is your job, right? To repair your battered mind_. Yeah, it is, so I snatch a deep breath from the air as I realize that I’ve wound up right in front of my new guardian’s doorstep, a nice little place typical of English neighborhoods where the houses hug each other like they’re those dynamic duos you see in middle school, and just as I knock on the door, I detect a faint shuffling as if my new guardian is actually a 50s housewife just caught preparing cookies.

The man that opens the door is not, in fact, an alcoholic beater, but a nice guy around the age of twenty-five with a smile as wide as _la Seine_ glazing a face freshened in youth and glee. “You must be Dallon!” he greets, somehow pleased to see the remnants of a suicidal headcase at his door.

In an anxious response, I lift the sparkling grape juice and box of crackers to invite the extremely welcoming man to them, and he accepts them, then he ushers me inside with a clap on the back that disperses my bones to the fury of an earthquake humming within my body. “Anyway, I’m Kenny Harris, and I promise I’m not some abusive troublemaker or anything.”

Well that soothes my anxiety. At least he’s not out to hurt me, but at what cost? There must be some flaw in his character, some aspect about him that will turn me away, if only a smidge. I shouldn’t be so willing to convict him, but it’s always better to be cautious than to be murdered in your sleep.

Kenny strides towards the kitchen to sever the cap of the sparkling grape juice from its slender bottle, that same smile everlastingly planted on his rosy lips as it rouges his cheeks as well, and I ignorantly broach a flammable topic just because I’m that kind of curious fool.

Fingers creeping down the kitchen table as I wait for his activity to be accomplished so that we can talk upfront, I murmur just loud enough for him to hear, “So...what happened to me? Why did I wake up in a hospital of no memory of what the hell I did to myself?”

I imagine that this is too early in our relationship for me to be mentioning the fact that I tried to fucking kill myself, but it’s been aggravating me ever since I was discharged from that pungent hospital, so it’s not like I can let the matter rest until I earn my answer. I think I’m entitled to my past, even if most people detest reflecting on it.

Kenny glances up from his job, more surprised than angry with my intractability. “We just met and you’re already asking about this? Don’t you want to know other things, like where you’ll be sleeping or or whose pictures are on my mantel or why my house smells like manuscripts and tears?”

I wring my hands together like a towel damp with Kenny’s aforementioned tears, nervous by my lowkey outburst. “Sorry.”

Kenny waves my doubts away. “No, kid, you’re right. You deserve to know.”

He doesn’t say anything else, only unscrews the bottle and pours some of the lavender liquid into wine glasses as if I’m not a seventeen year-old who will probably become dependent on anything presented as alcohol because of my sick mind, but eventually he speaks, tongue knotted in sidelined dread.

“You, um...you took some pills, and…” The edge of Kenny’s lip tweaks itself upward, pleading for me to connect the dots, so I do, and my shoulders trip from a ledge steeper than anything I’ve ever seen before.

And all I can say is _oh_.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I love kenny sm he's my precious bean
> 
> aesthetic: pretending to do math while I talk to my friends about raisins having weaves made out of mold
> 
> ~Dakotamold (that makes no sense I'm sorry)


	4. potato xD

So Kenny isn’t, in fact, an alcoholic beater like I thought he would be when my mind was clouded by paranoia and the shock of amnesia. Rather, he’s one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met, especially for an age where one just escapes college and is enduring an existential crisis with a dash of financial instability that commands them to be as hectic as is humanly possible and scare everyone who drops by the house to deliver milk like it’s the sixties while they’re actually just interested in why the hell there is a hermit still living in a house that they thought would be deserted from the resident’s bankruptcy, and it’s a true blessing from the atheistic heavens intended to serve metaphors that I’m able to live with him.

I’ve _been_ living with him for around five and a half weeks now, which I suppose is rounded to the lesser end of a new month called November, and I’m confident in saying that it’s been quite the treat. Kenny is always out and about, either cooking classic mac and cheese like a suburban mom or acting as if he wasn’t the one who found my mutilated body out on the street or wherever the hell I was, as if he wasn’t scarred by a treacherous sight such as that one, and we’ve been having a great time, more so than my days in Bordeaux with my family who has no clue (that I know of) of my attempt on the life whom they said would explore many psychological breakthroughs but hasn’t yet because I don’t want it to, as in I don’t want to live, or instead that I _didn’t_ want to live, but now I’m okay, and Kenny is helping me through the ups and downs of having my entire fucking existence swiped from me without so much as a warning, not even a brief warning, so that’s going pretty well on both ends. I feel like we’re improving in our relationship with each other, like I can tell Kenny anything from my limited knowledge of who I am, and he can tell me things about life and identity and everything else I’ve missed out on and have forgotten from my amnesia.

I’ve started to grow towards him, and I’ve grown _on_ him like a fungus or some shit like that, but he actually likes me, contrarily unlike a fungus. We’re smiling often, something I can predict that the old Dallon Weekes never enjoyed as much as I’m enjoying it now, and my jaw has begun to hurt, though it’s not like I give a single fuck about it, because it just feels so fucking wonderful to be happy and not bordering on the trap of suicide attempts and pills.

In addition to a few points of my identity, Kenny has reminded me that my murder weapon wasn’t _just_ pills. I claimed they were placebo pills for the long time apparently, and then I went to the pharmacy to purchase pills that weren’t as placebo as before, that weren’t as harmless as my friends had suspected, that were permanent and just right for my suicidal craving. That sounds completely and utterly horrible, and it’s obvious that I won’t be engaging in such illicit and unwarranted activities like those ever again, not after I hurt the person whose name I don’t even know anymore. There has to be someone, right? I must have been loved by someone so deeply that not even the ocean could compare, because there’s this fucking hollow sensation in my bones that doesn’t arise merely out of a failure. No, it’s from the loss of my lover being telepathically transmitted to me to make sure that I’m sufficiently guilty for what I did to him.

If I could see him, I would tell him that I am so, so sorry for what I did to this poor soul of a man, but I _can’t_ see him, because I don’t know where is, and I don’t even know _who_ he is, and I’m just so fucking hopeless in knowing where to start with pulling apart this mystery and extracting the useful strands that will lead me to my dream boy who probably hates me by now for all this shit I put him through, because if I do not know where he is, then he does not know where _I_ am, and that must be heartbreaking to him, as I am sliding away off the hook if I really want to be, while he is being forced to stick with searching for the tattered remains of the man he used to love and most likely still does, because anyone that doesn’t love me is going to leave me just like the rest before their time.

All I have is Kenny, and I am absolutely fine with that. I love it, actually, with all the freedom this living situation presents to me, and now Kenny is concerned that it’s a bit too much freedom. I’ve become a couch potato, as Kenny so eloquently describes it, and now he’s positioned me upon the distastefully salmon colored couch to discuss why I’ve been so lazy as of late, and I’m not liking it one bit.

“You need to go to school.”

The air is robbed of all sound except for me reclining in my chair, arms concussing in a pose typical of a rebellious teenager, which I am currently. “What if I don’t want to go to school?”

“You’ve been at home for long enough, and it’s a law that kids have to attend some sort of educational facility.”

My brows leap in faith for Kenny’s decision making. “Can I be home schooled then? Plenty of kids are doing that these days, because high school is fucking shit.”

“Even if high school _is_ fucking shit, I still have to work throughout the day, Dallon. You know that.”

I huff, pounding the table with my feet like this amnesia pounds my brain. “Fine. I’ll go to school. Whatever. If that will make you so happy and shit.”

“Why are you cursing so much?”

“If your memories were plundered by teenage mistakes, wouldn’t _you_ be cursing so much, too?” I showcase an annoyed expression, perhaps a tad too annoyed for his man who has taken such devoted care of me and has done nothing to offend whatever morals I have left, and I consider apologizing for a moment, but already he’s moved on anyway after pretending like he was unfazed.

“Dallon, I thought you were doing fine.”

“I am. Just forget about it.” When Kenny doesn’t relent, brows still poised in a search, I peevishly add, “I swear. You can lay off now.”

Kenny only accepts minor scrapes to his emotions, then pivoting towards the diplomatic side of his character. “You will be going back to the same school you left before, you know, the incident, which is Palo Verde High School, sometime soon, sometime when you decide that you’re not going to be a whiny bitch.”

“Don’t you think that’s just a pinch idiotic?” I close my fingers into a compression to replicate my woes. “To send me back to the place that probably influenced my suicide attempt?”

“Well I figured people would be nicer after they learn what happened to you, because no mortal dares to shame the dead or the almost dead, whereas a new school would instead make a big fuss about what you did to yourself and would probably hire bullies to target you for being a cutter or whatever it is that they call their peers these days.” Kenny waves it off all too casually, as though being labeled as a cutter and shunned from the area where you have to visit every day isn’t a terrible fate for someone just trying to survive after they recently never wanted to and imposed near death on themselves, but I’m hating every detail about this plan, so it’s really not all that monstrous in the grand scheme of things.

“All right!” I scream, tossing my hands into the air like it’s a game of basketball whom I shall hate forever and without restraint. “I’ll go to school!”

No abbreviated flicker of a smile sloshes over Kenny’s face, rather a touch of relief that began from below the bottom and was just trying to work towards the baseline. I can only guess that it’s from my unwillingness to cooperate with the man who’s just laboring to keep me alive and well and tend to me more than my own parents ever did, and I respect him for that, but I’m still a selfish cunt who is on a constant rampage for what I and only I believe to be right.

Kenny grinds the flat of his hand into his cheek, clearing the strain from his ordeal of convincing me to go to school, and a sigh tumbles up his throat. “I can take you shopping tomorrow for new school clothes, if you want. I assume you’re not enjoying my itchy sweaters so much.”

Nodding, I simply huddle into the jagged wool of Kenny’s clothing and puff a cloud out like cigarette smoke, because these sweaters _are_ pretty fucking itchy, and I’m nowhere near to being prepared for school. To say the very least, this is going to be disastrous.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I hate this chapter title I'm so sorry
> 
> okay so remember how at the end of one of UCDF's chapters I said I didn't have a crush? WELL!!!! I'm a fucking idiot and that is now a lie
> 
> aesthetic: newsboy caps and my gay-ass tears upon seeing them
> 
> ~Dacrushota


	5. don't talk to me or my son ever again

“Are you ready to go, Dallon?” Kenny asks, halfway tilted out the door frame and out into the street as if he has just reminded me of the location unknown to me to which he’s transporting me.

I had been immersed in a men’s fashion magazine to try and regain my sense of self, testing whether or not the old Dallon Weekes was a person totally into that kind of thing, but so far I’ve only been drawn to the greys and blacks and blues, not anything else inside the vast expanse of the flashy, garish catalog, and it’s becoming clear that the old Dallon Weekes tended to stay out of those matters. He doesn’t seem like one for appearance anyway, except for the appearance of being all right.

I glance up from the magazine, confused at the sudden shift in our usual routine of Kenny leaving for work and me lounging around the house with a lost sense of worth, inquiring, “Where are we going? It’s Sunday. You don’t have work, which means you wouldn’t be shipping me there anyway.”

Kenny only looks a bit disappointed, a minuscule flash of hurt honing his emotions, and he says, “I’m taking you shopping for new school clothes, remember?”

“With _your_ salary?” My brow balances on the ledge of my forehead, not quite believing that Kenneth Harris can afford to go out and buy masses of clothes for his newly acquired charge when all he cooks for dinner is mac and cheese and the occasional dinner roll when we’re lucky, but even that isn’t as splendid as the piles of cook books in the kitchen make it seem.

Kenny used to work at a pharmacy until I came along and required him to feed and clothe more people, if only _one_ more, and now he’s working heartily at a local bank with some experience he’s obtained from his dad, and his salary is rapidly increasing each week to the point where the bags under his eyes are slinking away to provide joy with a dash more of space.

“I got a raise. Now come on.”

Groaning, I detach my lazy body from the couch to join Kenny by the door, knowing full well that once we go shopping for new clothes, school follows promptly afterwards, and I really don’t wish to go back to that cesspool I knew played a part in almost killing me. However, I also really don’t wish to trouble Kenny with my stubbornness after all he’s done for me in the past few weeks, so I clamp my jaw down and meet the wind of the street head on.

“Thanks for coming with me, Dallon,” Kenny acknowledges, back turned towards me to lock the door so that his limited provisions will not be stolen from him and will not cause us to spiral into yet another pit of bankruptcy.

I swivel towards him, a plea supping the calm blue jay color of my eyes. “Just don’t prepare mac and cheese tonight please. This is the tradeoff.”

Kenny only smirks devilishly, because it’s always mac and cheese, forever and ever. It’s probably all that he knows how to cook judging from the lack of desire to read the cook books he’s hoarded in the kitchen over the years, and when he does get around to reading them, he’s just sitting at the dining table with a taunting laugh embracing his mouth because there’s no chance in hell that he could ever whip up something as perfect as the pictures in the manuals, and I doubt that he’s even trying to accomplish that anymore.

I slice through the connection between the car’s body and its door, folding myself inside of its tiny area, which shrinks tinier in the passenger seat where I’m situated, and Kenny joins me once rounding the car from the sidewalk and shuffling the key into its holder to light the engine like one would light a match for a fire.

The car ride is lathered with Kenny attempting to spark a conversation with his disinterested charge, which fails flatly against the pavement upon which the wheels of his used automobile are rolling, for I am only gathering my surroundings in my distorted organ of a brain to process what all of this means, process what attachment I hold to this city, process how I’m going to ever regain my memory of something as personal as my identity.

Now I don’t know how in the world I lost the core part of who I am, of my path in life, but I did, and I’m bewildered by everything more than upset about squandering myself, because I was already squandered before I washed up in a hospital with no clue why I was there. It most likely has something to do with dissociative amnesia, which is a temporary memory loss due to trauma, so from that I can deduce that this old Dallon Weekes of whom I speak so bitterly was out for destruction no matter the cost, and he must’ve been quite the heartbreaker.

I’ve begun to despise this monster of a man for all the things with which he plagued others restlessly, and then there’s the new Dallon Weekes who will have no part of it while recently recognizing that _full memory_ is a part of it, so I’m just kind of sitting here in a car with my only friend since the incident, panicked, because I understand that I did something ghastly to a person whom I remembered that I loved without end, but that love isn’t there anymore, and I’m struggling to comprehend why I could ever erase such a beauty from my life like it was a carefree gambling game in the casinos of Las Vegas, the city where I lost it all and never looked back, though not because I didn’t want to, but because my own stupid mistakes hindered my capability to do so.

So that’s why I do not talk. That’s why silence whips our ears until we’re tacitly begging for a reprieve, for sound to flow through us and into the brains that have been ruined by the past. That’s why I only allow my thoughts to drift out the window in the hopes that they’ll salvage an ounce of my memories, and that’s why I’m so fucking idiotic.

Eventually, after dreary minutes of quietness and wondering, Kenny halts his car in a parking space of something called a Walmart store (where I can apparently save money and live better, though those two may not always be so mutually exclusive, considering I probably used to save money by not eating much and by effect did _not_ live better, but that’s besides the point), and the vertically challenged man accompanying me exits the car, prompting me to do the same.

The wind glazes my eyes in a desert sand once I greet it, albeit I somehow survive the vigorous ordeal of the parking lot to the door of the Walmart store, ready to save money and live better and endeavor to maintain my consciousness from being outside for the first time in a month.

Everyone around me seems friendly enough, save the occasional rotten apple that any person in public would encounter at some point in their stroll, and that partially soothes my anxiety of this unfamiliar place, this devil store common in the United States for whatever absurd reason, and Kenny is a help as well.

“The clothing section is over here,” he informs me, guiding my jittering body over towards millions upon millions of racks with fabric strewn about them like the jungle just exploded upon the metal supports.

There are too many options in this store to perpetuate my stability, and I find myself weakened by the wide terrain of shoppers and products. However, I am tempted by the greys and blacks and blues, just like in the men’s fashion magazine at home, sifting through the various textiles like sand slides through fingers.

Kenny is impressed with my fashion choice, though his is the complete opposite of mine, and he lifts a few choices up to me to see if they fit, then nodding cheerfully when they do. This evokes a smile upon my own visage, truly heartened by life for the first anecdote since I can remember, which isn’t much, though it’s still wondrous anyway.

“Do you need any help?” an employee inquires a tad too cautiously for it to be normal, his face as glimmering as his _Spencer_ nametag.

Surprised, I immediately answer, “No, that’s okay, but thank you.”

I notice as he lingers for a few moments that he looks as though he had just seen a ghost, but he finally slithers away to tend to the other customers, now a suburban mom shrieking about how the stores doesn’t carry the size of her stick-figured child.

“He seemed a pinch odd,” Kenny remarks once the boy has departed, focus nipping at the worker’s heels like a concerned parent. “Do you think he’s all right?”

“Maybe it’s that Americans don’t like foreigners much.” I’m laboring to transmute these circumstances into lighter topics, and Kenny submits to my trials with a grin as he selects a few more articles of clothing to add to the basket, including his trademark sweaters, this time in my favorite colors instead of his classic 1960s chiffon.

Being outside feels nice. I should go outside more often, sort the sunlight through my fingertips, and breathe clearly until I die.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: lmao why spencer in here (((cause foreshadowing not really, more of a connection to UCDF)))
> 
> aesthetic: the various things I hear from boys on the football field
> 
> ~Dakotoe


	6. meet me behind k-mart bring a bagel

I’ve been meandering around Kenny’s house for at least a month, doing nothing and saying less besides the occasional plea for a dinner that isn’t mac and cheese for once (Kenny never listens nonetheless), likening to a sloth now that I think about it, and it’s obvious that Kenny has grown tired of my lazy antics and has forced me to go to school to repent and possibly change my sinful ways.

For a couple days after Kenny told me I would be going back to the wretched hole that is the Palo Verde high school, I was absolutely terrified. I hated the mere thought of returning to the place who distorted me until the old Dallon Weekes considered suicide and would’ve died if his pills were strong enough, stronger than he could ever be, because you don’t do that to a person. You don’t send a veteran back to the warzone where their friends died, where they witnessed gore and blood and betrayals, where they shivered in their trenches and prayed that they wouldn’t be hit by the fire of their enemies, because destruction is derived from something like that, and likewise school was that warzone for the old Dallon Weekes.

School was like the World War One shellshock effect, warping my body as it warped my mind as well so that I could never be quite the same as I was, because even if I am restored to perfect posture and flat feet and most things that I used to be (though none of it is really all that pleasurable), there’s still the notion that I was destroyed by a place that should fight for freedom but doesn’t, as I found myself in an abyss.

I assume that sometimes I was inconsolably afraid of visiting school, most likely to the point of stress and meltdowns and temper tantrums primarily as a child, and my parents must’ve been furious with me, but I, of course, did not care, because school was the absolute worst thing in the whole wide world.

Now, however, as I stand in my bedroom in front of the full body mirror that Kenny decided to purchase, with a scarf of nostalgia threatening to hang me by the neck to the floor, I’m not so scared anymore, because really how bad could it be?

That’s the spirit. That’s also how I fall harder.

~~~~~

Right when Kenny dropped me off at the front of Palo Verde High School, I received stares from people who thought I was dead and have just seen the ghost that is actually a living person who is as confused as they are, but I don’t allow them to persuade me towards shyness, as I’m familiar with the bewilderment, too.

No one speaks to me, on the contrary, only observes and attempts to make it seem as though they’re not, as though I’ve always been at this school and am just a regular student, as though I didn’t recently attempt to fucking kill myself and am now back from the almost dead to haunt them with the cracking of their misconceptions.

All of these stares are beginning to unnerve me, and it’s a miracle that I’ve made it down the bustling corridor and to the locker Kenny claims is mine upon this index card he’s written me to make certain that I’ll survive my nescience to school.

To me, surveying my possessions is just like a high school student preparing to move to another place in the country, so they’re saying goodbye to their school and their friends and their locker, and then there’s this extremely melancholic scene where they’re shutting said locker with that iconic click before the screen swipes to black and then shows them rolling down the country road towards their new home as they stare forlornly out of the window. My previous situation dictated the same thing, except I wasn’t moving anywhere besides the grave, but before I attempted suicide I swear I would’ve checked by locker to say goodbye just like the high schoolers did in those movies I’ve seen countless times.

As I gaze into the metal contraption that store my rotting school books, I surmise that nothing has changed. That, or I stripped the walls of personal pictures and everything that was me, and it’s not like I know anymore anyway, so I’m as helpless as before. There are no pictures plastered to the laterals, though I haven’t been in family pictures since I was thirteen years old, and there are no crafts or paintings or sketches that I’ve etched into paper for my viewing pleasure, not one thing that reminds me of the old Dallon Weekes. The locker is dull and dreary and dark, nothing like the lockers of my peers, who decorate theirs with many different items to customize them to their personality, but since September twenty-second, two thousand sixteen, I haven’t had a personality, not one that I can remember at least.

I suppose that leaves me a chance to create a new one, a personality that I have meticulously selected to suite my ambitions, and I’ll become more successful that way if I order things correctly. I can be funny, I can be trustworthy, and perhaps I can also be the happy artist that no one ever is, but _I_ could be that happy artist. I could revert my life towards positivity, and I could never look back to my suicide attempt.

I didn’t want to be like this, like the old Dallon Weekes, but I knew that I was making necessary arrangements to die, and I feel like that’s something humans never get the chance to do before their fear of the grave sweeps them away into hysteria. _Now_ I can be the person I’ve always wanted to be, and going to school will help me with that. It’s suddenly not so horrific anymore.

Until I spy that timid figure across the hall, barely diagonal to my own dismal locker with his soft doe eyes curiously inspecting me to see if it’s me, to see if I really died, to see if I’m back to be his friend. Was I his friend? Did I know him? Why is he so troubled with that worried gleam of tears in his hickory irises?

After you attempt suicide, you start to think about what would happen if you didn’t. You would be alive, no doubt, and your friends would be happier, but would you? And maybe you would keep that special friend who could improve you if you let him, and maybe that special friend is this kid across the hallway with memories tipping out of his quivering lips, this kid in whom I’m abruptly interested now that he’s presented himself to this amnesic freak of a person called Dallon Weekes.

Comprehending that I’ve acknowledged this kid with only something as minuscule as my attention, he bounds over to me and creases his arms over my stiff figure, salving his lungs with a sigh and a brief permission of contented sound. “Dallon!” he yells, though already close enough to me that he could’ve whispered.

This kid seems like he could be my friend, but how could I ever know with this perpetual amnesia fogging up the windows in my mind pointing out towards the world so that I know nothing about nature or memories or my core identity? Even if he were just a stranger who was far too concerned about my apparent death, he’s just the type to be my friend currently. I think I’ll hold onto him.

“I’m sorry — what’s your name again?” Part of me feels immoral for asking this to a person I recognize must’ve meant the world to me, especially when I could’ve caught it from other people calling him, but I’m foolish, and it just came out anyway.

The boy glances up from me, miffed. “What do you mean ‘what’s your name again’?”

This strikes a blow at me, because now I’m certain that he meant the world to the old Dallon Weekes, but I know nothing about him, so I only repeat my question. “I mean...what’s your name again?”

“Shouldn’t you know it? I’m your fucking boyfriend, and you’re doing this shit to me.” The kid steps away from me, taking offense and a sprinkle of despair at the fact that someone whose brain he probably adored has now been robbed of their past. “And do you know what you did to my sister, too?”

I shake my head, lapsing into a phobia of what this man will do to _me_ rather than what _I_ did to his sister.

“You were her friend, like an older brother, and you fucking left her.”

“I don’t know her, but I apologize.”

“No, you don’t. You don’t even know what you did to us, because your sorry ass couldn’t bear to stick around for the aftermath, so tell me, Dallon: are you _really_ apologizing?” The boy’s eyes cave into slits, conniving and malevolent.

Shaking, I push away from my locker, books strewn messily about my frail arms. “I have to leave.”

No intention of letting me go, the boy snags me by the wrist. “You have to explain.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: ugh why am I such a life ruiner
> 
> aesthetic: neckties I fucking swear
> 
> ~Dakotie


	7. hey kids wanna buy some pAIN

Under all of the layers of self-hatred I’ve detected in Dallon, he’s somehow back, and not even a suicide attempt could silence him. He absolutely abhorred himself, and he never even looked in the mirror because he didn’t need to. Other people’s reactions were enough. Are their mouths wide open? They’re stunned by him. Are their brows pinched with a clothespin? They’re disgusted by his presence here. Are they rushing up to hug him because they haven’t seen him in a while? He must’ve forgotten them, forgotten their impact on his disposition because not once did he glance at the reflection of himself, and that’s where he went wrong, because now he has no idea who the hell he is, and if I was such a grand part of him then he’s forgotten me, too.

I’m grateful, at least, that he’s complied with my wishes to bring him home to have him explain what in the world is going on with him and his brain and why I’m so pushy all of the sudden towards the millions of answers I’ve amassed inside of my head and on the index cards I’ve drafted to him that he will never read, and though Dallon is hesitant, he’s here nevertheless, plunging his black Converse sneakers into the bricks of my front staircase leading towards the house where he will provide me with the closure I never thoroughly received by thinking that he was dead.

He’s confounded. Of course he is. Who wouldn’t be confounded when someone you don’t know rushes up to you claiming to be your best friend? Yeah, it’s from amnesia purposes, but I’m still a stranger to him, but I’m praying that by the time I’m finished with this visit like it’s one of our old tutoring sessions that he will be my companion once more.

But I’m still nervous about it all, because Dallon doesn’t know me — not really, only in the depths of his mind, the depths that he cannot access — but I know Dallon, and I know everything about him that there is to know. I know that his favorite animal is an otter, that he hates cheese, that when I was awake and scared in the night he looked angelic in rest, and I also know that I never want to forget these things like he did.

Therefore, it is my duty to remind Dallon of every detail that was once his, because he deserves to understand the most essential part of him, an essential part that he himsef has been developing since birth but has now been halted due to amnesia. Square one is the worst place to be, and I’m digging Dallon out of that pit.

“Brendon,” Dallon says, just testing out how my name wriggles on his tongue, how the _r_ catches in his throat due to his mellifluous accent of Bordeaux, how he’s never said it before while being in this amnesic state, how it meant so much to me before in the terms of love but now only shrivels between narrowed eyes like a flower that hasn’t been watered in the month that Dallon has been gone, in the month that left me to my own spiteful devices, and all throughout that time I was running away from danger when the danger was in my shadow, running away from _me_ because of the monster I had become.

“Yes, Dallon?” I respond, still as timid as I was in the shadows of the lockers, but my old friend drops his words like he wasn’t going to say them at all. “Anyway, Kara (that’s my sister) isn’t home, so we can talk privately about what the hell is happening to both of us and what we used to be.”

Dallon acknowledges me tacitly, completing his journey through the door as he warily glances at me to make sure that he did the right thing, but I clap him over the shoulder and guide him towards the living room, where he settles into the chair directly across from me like he’s a client and I’m the therapist he definitely needs but won’t dare to admit his thirst for.

Silence sweeps fidgeting silhouettes across the oxford walls, painted in silence and chipping with each second we wallow in the quietness of being friends without reciprocation, of being amnesic and clear headed, of being estranged from the ties we once gripped so tightly like they would fly free if we didn’t, but they eventually loosened, and we were thrown into a void, so now we’ve been resting in hushed tones for thirty-seven seconds, and Dallon decides that it’s time to speak.

“Can you tell me about myself? Like, who was I before I…” — he nods to me, accompanied by rolling hand gestures, to convey his message — “you know.”

I slam my hands together frankly. “There’s a lot to tell.”

“Well what did I enjoy? What did I love?”

I don’t reply for three seconds, only guarded by a slight smile at the corner of my rosewood lips as I recall every magical detail about my beloved Dallon Weekes, bittersweet like reflecting upon the summertime of years ago and wishing your life were like that now, but it’s not, so I only thrive in a distant memory before all of the chaos and turmoil spread rubble over this relationship. It’s beautiful while it lasts.

“Though surrealism was your specialty, you loved finger painting out of all of your art styles, for some reason.” My eyes tumble into my lap, the tiny grin still present. “I think it made you feel like a child again, when nothing ever mattered besides Saturday morning cartoons and play blocks.”

“Yeah, I can see how that would be nice.” Dallon recompenses my smile, displaying those pearly teeth I’ve always envied. “I remember that I love psychology and art out of my interests, but I think that’s it.”

“Well you also enjoyed waltzing, though you never showed me your moves.”

Grin conquering wider portions of Dallon’s face now, he promises, “I can waltz with you later, if you want.”

“That would be amazing, and we can also waltz to the classical music in which you constantly indulge.”

Dallon spikes an enticing brow, somewhat like an entertainer for hire.

I smirk. “Your favorite is Mozart.”

I’m trying my best to keep my cool, and I think it’s going pretty well, with all of the giggles we’re exchanging together like our friendship never ceased, if only temporarily, but one day I’ll have to admit that I’m not okay with what he did to me, because he was all that I needed. He was the nothing that I craved, but I didn’t want it in this way. I could’ve settled for his life, his beautiful life, not his suicide attempt, but what the human mind desires is very different from what the human mind receive.

“You love birds, too,” I continue, as excited as the child I hope to be again. “The blue jays are your preference. They match your eyes.”

“I’ve begun to adore the wrens, too,” Dallon muses, beholding the landscape outside of the window, where those admired birds frolick in the air, and his vision then strides to me. “They match yours.”

Embarrassment graffitis my cheeks in scarlet, a scarlet for whom I’m pleading to leave me alone to replace itself with security and not the amused effects of Dallon witnessing my unease and transmitting his alabaster teeth to my sight, but I endure the tint to my skin in the faith that it’ll vanish soon.

“Your favorite number is fourteen, by the way. I don’t know why that’s useful, considering you detest mathematics, but there you go.”

“I actually quite like mathematics,” Dallon negates as he ponders this subject.

Disappointed, my jaw deploys from the remainder of my face. “Please don’t tell me you’ve converted to the dark side.”

A chuckle slots Dallon’s throat, jubilant in character and just as fulfilling. “I think I have good judgement.”

“You also have a kink for playing with my hair.”

My companion drapes himself in an erotic expression, toying with the few emotions I still retain. “Do I?”

I roll my eyes. “Ugh, you’re already a pain in the ass.”

Winking obnoxiously, Dallon counters, “But you’ll remember how much of a pain in the ass I am. You’ll remember _me_.”

Yes, of course I’ll remember him, because I don’t deny people the common courtesies they should be endowed. And no, I’m not blaming Dallon for a case of what seems to be dissociative amnesia, because obviously that’s in no way his fault for being terrified of his mistakes, but I just wish he would’ve never forgotten _me_.

"When people say they want to be remembered, they mean they desire a legacy to trail behind them, like their face on a billboard or their name constantly in a magazine or the praise for even their minor achievements. But with us, I want you to look me in the eyes and know that I was your goddamn world, and that’s all.” Permitting a segmented sigh to gear out of my lungs, I carry on. “And there was something that you used to say. I’m wondering if you remember at least that.” I’ve anticipated the dark route that this conversation is headed, but it needs to be broached. “ _Je n’aime que toi_. I—”

“I love only you,” Dallon finishes, smitten by a significance that he has somehow remembered through the loads of pandemonium and frustration of these circumstances, that he has survived towards enlightenment. “And then you used to respond with _toujours_ —”

“ _Toujours, mon chéri_. Always, honey.”

It’s almost like we said it. It’s almost like we meant it.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: this chapter is so sweet,,,,why do I mislead you like this
> 
> aesthetic: well, not to brag, but my friend bailey looks bomb af today (just sayin')
> 
> ~Daesthetic


	8. this is just like hannibal

Dishing out varied cups for the both of us to store the same old orange juice we’ve always consumed at dinner, Kenny requests, “Dallon, could you help me set the table please? I have a lot on my hands right now, in case you haven’t noticed in your impenetrable art trance.”

Yeah, he _does_ have a lot on his hands. He’s been back and forth between work and home with only an abbreviated period of repose to collect himself and pray that he won’t be a victim to premature wrinkling at such a young age of twenty-five, but he’s already gathered lavender bags under his eyes and a weariness in his step, so aiding him in his notably mundane kitchen ordeal is the least I can do for the harrowing circumstances.

Kenneth Harris must be a saint if I’ve ever seen one, as he never raises his voice in anger, only to snare my attention when I’m lost in a creative trance like I am now, even through these piles of anxiety and guilt for not being the person his parents wanted him to be in the workplace and in the economy, for he’s pulling through for me and for himself, because he cares that much. I understand that mac and cheese for what appears to be the thirty-fourth meal in a month isn’t so appealing, but what else can I ask of him? He’s already doing enough for me, and it’s my unspoken duty to appreciate him and his gigantic efforts.

My pencil halts in the middle of an insignificant line around the wrist of my figure (who may or may not be Brendon Urie) to drain the artistic essence from my soul. The outside world becomes clearer now that I’ve cascaded into reality like a leaf cascades to the ground thickening in vibrant colors during autumn, and I immediately realize that the time is just over six o’clock and that I’ve been drawing for a little under two hours, just sketching and erasing because it never looks as perfect as I had imagined it to be, and it probably will never reach that point as long as I’m working on it, because even though I’ve only met Brendon Urie once in this amnesic state, he and his irises reminiscent of a wren’s nest are too magnificent for me to portray upon something as lowly as sketchbook paper.

However, I’ve been cognizant since the beginning of my art career that nothing I will ever create can be flawless, so at the commencement of my drawing session I was simply scratching idly at the paper until I recognized that Brendon Urie was floating in my subconscious and ordering me to draw him, and that is what I was inadvertently doing, and ever since then I’ve been captivated by each stroke and curve and texture of his body, of his skin, of his eyes — oh his eyes, how I adore them, so dainty like fine china that will break at the slightest of touches, so I refrain, instead maintaining a distance at which it is safe to observe and marvel at their hickory wonders and itch for a pencil to be chained to my fingers so that I may bury him in paper, not once being disturbed by the prosaic comedies of other humans who know nothing of art and its muses.

Normally, I begin to fume at interruptions during my art sessions, never being able to reign in the creativity after even a brief cutout of three seconds or so and most often just abandoning the work entirely, but this is Kenneth Harris I’m addressing, the only one who has brought me up for the past month without any major conditions that would seem out of the ordinary, and all he asks if for me to help him set the table when he’s been stressed out of his mind because of work and the fact that this work is the only source of food and shelter and warmth for us two, so I rise from my chair, gently planting my newest drawing of my newest friend on the coffee table so that it won’t be harmed, and dash to assist Kenny.

“Could you pass out the silverware please?” Kenny inquires, now rooting through the cabinets for two bowls for his perpetual specialty of mac and cheese (it’s not so much that it’s unpleasant to the tastebuds, just that it’s mutated into something monotonous).

Barely acknowledging Kenny with a gesture, I unlatch the drawer from its slot and reveal the array of both plastic and metal silverware amassed over the years of parties and shopping visits. The plastic utensils are somewhat chewed by repeating the ramifications of either a previous dog or tumultuous use, and the metal utensils have relinquished a portion of their shine from their age and the corporal section of the inheritance that Kenny probably never needed but couldn’t decline because his parents would’ve complained about how he’s an ungrateful, entitled, spoiled son when in reality he just doesn’t have enough space for heaps of items in his house that’s already too cramped for the passengers it currently serves.

I select two forks and two spoons (to provide both of us with a preference in utensil while we consume the ever present macaroni and cheese that’s too amorphous to decide beforehand how it will be operated), then migrating over to the table, where most of the items have been strewn about the mahogany surface and clue me in to the notion that Kenny has completed most of the job and didn’t really need me much anyway, just hoped that I would get up from my two hour dream for fear that it was transforming into something incipiently unhealthy.

As I fill my chair once concluding that everything is prepared for dinner (which didn’t require as much time as I had suspected, meaning I could’ve finished my drawing of my new friend), Kenny lugs the ceramic pot of macaroni and cheese to the table, where it clanks upon the mahogany with a thud and a burst of steam from the cracks in between the body and the lid of the container, and he then drips the contents into both of our bowls, blowing on his to eradicate the insurmountable heat from the pasta’s edible flesh.

“So how was your first day of school, Dallon?” Kenny investigates promptly after melting into his chair.

Instantaneously I clam up, like a zipper has slid through my vocal chords to transport them elsewhere, because truthfully it’s not in my nature to assess how my day was, chiefly when all I received was confounded stares and a friend who claims to have known me before I attempted suicide. I’ll try to decode this cesspool, though. It’s for Kenny.

“I met someone, in fact,” I finally state, nodding my head as a reassurance to myself that I can share my experiences with Kenny. “His name is Brendon Urie, and he’s the first person who talked to me when I got there. The rest of the people only stared at me like I was an alien.”

“Well to be fair, you _did_ basically just rise from the dead.”

I shrug, my vision wading in the lumps of cheese and pasta occupying my plastic bowl. “Brendon was genuine, at least.”

“Then you should keep him as a friend,” Kenny suggests, spooning a small bite of heavily cheesed macaroni into his mouth.

Fiddling with the fork between the tips of my two fingers, a small smile weaves into the edge of my lips, indulging in the simple pleasures of life and near death. “Yeah, he’s quite nice, actually. I think he’s something special.”

Damn it. I can’t be falling in love with someone I’ve just met. All Brendon Urie did for me was invade my personal space, and this could’ve been justifiable in the sense that he was unaware that I have no idea who the hell he was and who the hell he is currently, but I’m nevertheless suspended in a fog that’s toying with everything I thought I understood, and that invasion should be a warning of Brendon’s mental pandemonium. Maybe, on the contrary, I still subconsciously store the wonderful memories of him in the back of my mind, memories that are protesting to be displayed. My brain knows that Brendon Urie must have meant something to me back when I was craving to be dead, but should I allow my brain to be correct now that I’m all right in my mental health? For all I know, Brendon could’ve been manipulating me into dangerous situations in which I otherwise wouldn’t have found myself, so what’s the real truth? What do I do about this festering crush?

Nothing, because I’m very much a person who will go with the flow when they have no other options, and it might be fun to be swept away into a love that never really died. I need a muse, anyway.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: dallon is just like me like honestly if you even laugh at my jokes I fall in love with you
> 
> aesthetic: WRITErs or ARtSITS A+++ siGn M e U,,P
> 
> ~Dakoterrible


	9. wholesome as a bald man

All I can think about is Dallon fucking Weekes. Just Dallon Weekes. Just Dallon Weekes and his pearly smile, his blue jay eyes, his blatant homoeroticism, everything that I love and will never stop loving, everything with which I had to part for the period when he was gone, when I thought he was fucking dead and in the cold, hard dirt but was just recovering from the acceptance that he was so messed up that he decided to try and kill himself before asking his best friend for help.

Things are looking up now that Dallon is back in my pathetic little life, without any placebo pills to harm both him and his cognition, and he’s all that’s on my mind since he departed, though I’m not really sure if that’s a fruitful or unfruitful thing. It feels nice anyway, and I’ve been coating myself in the pleasure for a while.

In fact, ever since he left at the urgent request of his guardian (whom I think is named Kenneth Harris and whom I know was uncertain of where Dallon has been for the past hour or so), I’ve been positioned on the couch with my focus beaming towards the wall, a wall that possesses nothing special about it yet serves as a place to channel my thoughts of this godforsaken man who has stumbled back into my godforsaken life to implement some godforsaken art like he always did.

I love that damn art he’s been creating since before he could even grasp what art is, and I love the few occasions when he shares that art with me, as it’s like glimpsing a fragment of his soul, of a mind spinning with millions of ideas and colors and the imagination of a child that we teenagers wish we could be forever, but he holds that in his delicate hands like it’s something as mundane as the cycle in which we are trapped.

The cycle commands that when it rains on the hair I styled that morning, I will reflect on the sun’s ability to dry it. When the sun shines on me and pollutes my eyes with blindness, I will reflect on the shadows the rain plants upon the ground. I will bask in the lies that only seem real because I am being tortured by an alternate force. I will never be happy, only snared in the loop that is life, and I will eventually die from it, cold in the dirt with no one to remember my illegitimate struggles, except Dallon will be there to laugh at me, at my foolishness for believing that people care if I once lived and if I once breathed and if I once died, when in reality we are all doomed to the same fate, the same cycle of life, and we humans are much more focused on our own trials, such as why we are suffocating and cascading towards the same place as me, until only one of the three motions is veritable. And that is what Dallon understands, and that is why Dallon remains to be a child, and that is why seeing him return to me is so painful, because there is another side of children that festers into rage and tears and miscomprehension of emotional situations to the point where they just shut down completely and won’t uncurl from their ball of solitude to sort through their feelings, the chemicals in their brains, the complications of their actions and their thought process and their existence, and that is very much why I had no idea that Dallon was on the edge of killing himself, and he would’ve, no doubt, succeeded with that plan were it not for a miscalculation in how powerful the drug was, but maybe he knew all along that the drugs would not prevail and he was merely scared of dying and leaving me to my anger that may be more childlike than Dallon ever was, and for that I’m only partially thankful.

Because as far as I know, Dallon spent a month influencing the minds of those who were dear to him, influencing them to believe that he was dead, that he left them like they never mattered a thing to him in his vivid expanse of art and psychology, and perhaps they didn’t, because he didn’t allow us so much as a warning of what he was going to do, and if he ever did consider it before he tried to kill himself, it would be like the _Sussex_ pledge, ‘cause he never kept his promise forever if he ever promised anything at all.

And Kara, my sister of all people, realized that Dallon was a scam, and she was fucking devastated by what happened to her friend, and now she’s quieter and writes poetry whenever she snags the chance, but she ends up lighting a fire just to burn her words, because if you burn your words you can never speak them, and that was enough like Dallon’s mindset to be satisfying.

No one needs to know if someone said something, because most of the time people are trying to cover up their regretful words anyway, and Kara might as well be Yoda or some shit with her wise thinking that contradicted the mainstream of broadcasting one’s phony words to the public just to hate them later and wish they had never done something so foolish, as Kara is more intelligent than anyone could ever determine, and as a reward I need to inform her of today’s pivotal event.

“Kara! I have some news!” I burst through the front door to discover Kara on the couch, writing poetry like she’s been doing for the past month but has never shown me any fruit of her labors.

My sister is unfazed. She has _been_ unfazed since Dallon tried to kill himself, and for all she knows he’s still dead. In fact, until this morning I thought he was dead, and I’m here to relay the message that a new faith is on the horizon for the both of us, that Dallon Weekes is alive and well and might be the happy artist I prayed he would be since the beginning of our friendship.

I shrug, swiveling away from my indifferent sister and subtlety caressing the table with my fingertips as I wait for her to freak out at my next comment. “Oh, sorry, I guess you wouldn’t care if Dallon were to come back.”

All of the sudden, Kara’s head whips around to me, eyes like a gleaming blade meant to murder me if I’m not telling the truth, and she sincerely hopes that I’m not bluffing like I usually am, or else she’ll fervidly release her morals to add a few indelible items to her permanent record. “What the fuck did you just say?”

I turn towards her again, a smirk tying the edge of my lips in a bundle. “Yeah, that’s right. Dallon Weekes, my beloved Dallon Weekes, is not as dead as you thought he was.”

I’m playing an approach that I shouldn’t be playing, one of teasing my little sister into fascination with what I have to tell her, when in reality all it will bring is a slight relief before she erupts into sobs because the man she thought was fucking dead is actually not dead at all.

“You’re fucking joking, right? You have to be joking. H-he died. You can’t escape death.” Kara is anxious now, heartbeat fluctuating like the wings of a hawk soaked in stress, and she leaps from the couch, abandoning her paper and pencils for the sweet mercy of a decoded sophism.

“His pills weren’t strong enough, I guess.”

And I cannot explain how fucking _grateful_ I am that his pills weren’t strong enough, because now I have the love of my life back in my small reality, in my small cycle of living and breathing and dying, because with him here, those three things have gained purpose, and it no longer feels like I am a machine, a robot, a puppet on strings controlled by the natural order of the universe. Instead, it feels like I am as shapeless as art, as complex as psychology, as beautiful as Dallon Weekes himself. And that’s fucking awesome.

“Oh, this is fantastic!” Kara almost strangles me with her arms around my waist, something so unlike her yet exactly what she needs in this moment, and thankfully she pulls back eventually, asking excitedly, “Where is he? Can I see him? I have so much to say.”

“He’s at home right now, but he’ll be back at some point. I promise.”

“That dick ass better see me soon, or else he’ll be witnessing the largest shitstorm in history coming his way.”

“He’ll be here,” I reassure her, tilting my head down and grasping her shoulders like any compassionate person would do, even if it seems as though my compassion has died in the war that my mind is trying to convince me never happened. “He hasn’t been here for a while, but he’ll be here now. I’ll make sure of that.”

“You’d better,” Kara snaps, relinquishing her affection for the man in favor of that boss ass bitch attitude she loves to wear every second of every day. “That rat ass isn’t getting away so easily.”

And I can’t really expect anything else from her.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: today's episode of Kara Is My Queen
> 
> aesthetic: the 1940s/1950s I'm about to cry (not the homophobia and racism and such, just the general vibe, like swing dances and greasers and all that oml I'm dead)
> 
> ~Dakrashcourse


	10. I was gonna make a pun but instead I'll apologise

The majestic Brendon Urie has been incredibly elated since my arrival back into his life that he says would’ve been pathetic otherwise, and I really doubt that, but it’s evident that he’s been pretty shaken up by what monstrosities I inflicted upon myself when I was high on artificiality and teen angst and leaning over the edge of suicide to glimpse how beautiful the flowing waterfall looked to my mortal eyes who knew nothing then besides the prickling, stabbing sensation of wanting to die, of wanting to end it all, of wanting the dirt of my grave to infest my nails to prove that this is permanent and has already invaded who I am now.

My mental health is better and improving still, but Brendon doesn’t seem to realize this, still acting as though I am a child who needs to be protected at all costs, despite the fact that I’ve assured him countless times that I’m absolutely fine, but he’s somehow interpreted it like I’m upset with him, though I’m not, and he’s now taking me out for coffee with one of his friends that I already know but my amnesic mind doesn’t, and I can only predict a high level of awkwardness to come my way, because I should be friends with this guy, but I haven’t the slightest clue about his character, and I frankly don’t know where to begin.

So I’m just reclining stiffly in one of the metal chairs on the outside patio of _La Mystique_ , which I can only guess was selected as our frequent hangout spot because it has a French name and I’m, well, French, and I can already assume that this Ryan Ross guy is deeply into irony and exploitation for the jubilant purpose of humor. My only reprieve from this anxiety was when the waiter visited us to collect our orders, at which point I expressed my thirst for a chamomile tea and hid my thirst to flee this tense location, but after that, Ryan’s pragmatic game of staring at me continued like it had never been interrupted.

There’s a certain intrigue to this stare, however, like he’s not actually lost in his thoughts, rather endeavoring to decode what it is that I’ve done to resurrect myself, and I’ll have to confess that I don’t understand it either, that I don’t even understand who I was before I attempted suicide, and I find that to be a neat comparison. You can never remember who you were as a child, because you’ve since been consumed by darkness manifested out of your own derangement, and if it is so, then Ryan will be unsuccessful at gathering what he thinks he deserves for all of this strife I’ve forced him into.

Brendon, on the contrary, is utterly indifferent, just pitying himself in the confines of his chair as he watches for something to dance in his mug stained by a latte like a typical white girl, but nothing does, so he’s merely wading in fruitlessness as always, because the only thing he ever desired is back in his grasp, and he doesn’t really know where to go from here, so he’s just perusing the textures of his coffee like they amount to the glory of the drapes in a medieval castle.

Ryan compresses the bridge of his nose, stressed beyond belief. “Dallon, why the hell would you do this?”

Quite surprised, Brendon glances up from his staring contest against his coffee to instead observe my nervousness unfolding like the gestation of a dam’s demise, partially sympathetic and partially wondering the same thing.

Of course Ryan would investigate something like this. Of course I can supply no veritable answer, because I really have no fucking idea what happened on the twenty-second of September when I overdosed on fragile pills yet expected myself to die. Of course he’s still waiting for me to soothe his guilty conscience, so I prepare to baffle him with my improvised bullshit.

“Why did I do it, you ask? Because I was young and stupid, and yes, I’m only seventeen years old currently and was seventeen years old when I attempted suicide, but I was younger and stupider then than I am now. No one really escapes from being young and stupid, only gradually decreases their supply of the characteristics until only arrogance masks their presence.”

“Do you find yourself to be arrogant?” Brendon murmurs, head back in his coffee out of fear for the repercussions of his audacious words, and it’s not like I’d hurt him, but he should be aware of the boundaries and aware of what I do and do not know about myself.

“I think I’m pretty damn selfish, if anything.”

Encapsulating a sigh in his lungs, Brendon negates, “Dallon, you’re not selfish.”

“Then why did I allow myself to leave you, _mon petit ami_? God knows how much I loved your perpetual presence in my life, ‘cause that was a great fucking help to me, but through it all I never valued _my_ presence in _your_ life, so I concluded that it was reasonable to take those pills and abandon my best friend. That’s selfish, Brendon Urie. That’s not being a typical human organism, and with some deluded luck, you’re not even infuriated by me when I can comprehend that you have a sensible right to be.”

Ryan is silent now, undertaking Brendon’s previous job as if someone has to do it, and he ponders everything that I’ve just said so that he can sort through what I really did, because as far as his frequently dim mind extends, my explanation was just a load of bullshit meant to excuse me from my atrocious crimes, and I’m not claiming to be innocent, just unaware of my surroundings and of my past, and there is at least more innocence in that than there is in a normal person with all of their memories sanely intact.

“Yeah, it was a blight that you departed without a warning, and it was a blight that I was torn apart by it, but you weren’t selfish for doing that. Sometimes I think you were just looking out for your own safety, and though I’m in pieces, I must respect that.”

“Do not allow me to complete you, because you are not broken. Nothing I could ever do will spin you a fragmented soul, and I want you to recognize that...but when you came to my side and said that losing me was like losing a part of yourself, I’m not sure if that sort of recognition is on the horizon for you, Brendon Urie. You need to detach yourself from the severance of your soul and be cognizant that you have never been less than an entirety, and then you can look out for your safety like you said I looked after mine.”

“He’s doing better, you know,” Ryan finally chimes in, though his attention still basks in the creamy wonderland of his coffee. “You helped him, then you destroyed him, and now you’re healing him. I can see how it’s not healthy to be disorganized by someone you should trust unconditionally, but you two pulled through in the end, and as a friend to both of you, I’d like to wish you future prosperity with whatever it is that’s circulating your limbic systems right now, whether it be confliction or idolatry or a mix of the two.”

Based on the little I’ve seen from Ryan’s character, amassing most of it by the deviousness hunting his chocolate irises for residence, I can surmise that vocalizing opinions as serious as this one is not his forte, and that’s conceivably judicious, because not everyone is born to be a public speaker or even _wants_ to be a public speaker, but I tacitly applaud Ryan for his conducive efforts.

“Thank you, Ryan,” Brendon acknowledges, guarding the lowest tone he can exhume from his straining vocal cords.

“No problem. You’ve been through enough hell for me not to say anything about your labors, and strenuous labors they are.”

“Well, to be fair, we’re all destined for the grave anyway,” I remind them, blanketing a conversation moving towards joy in my nihilistic gloom. “Statistics dictate that about one hundred fifty-nine thousand six hundred thirty-five people will die on the same day as I do. Many will host funerals shortly afterwards. All will be mourned. The end of my life will be the same as the end of theirs, the end of almost one hundred sixty thousand people, nothing special to supplement my passing. So when you think about it...my death is utterly insignificant.”

“Dallon, you can’t say that.” It’s as though Brendon is remarkably offended by what opinions I’ve shared with him, but I must make it obvious that I have no intentions of dying or of killing myself once more. I just accept that one day I will die and it will be an ordinary occurrence, but it’s clear that Brendon doesn’t understand any of this, so I suppose he’s endowed his astonishment.

“You just got back from a suicide attempt and you’re already preparing yourself for round two?” Ryan’s brows are suspended on a high ledge of his forehead, mouth modeling in an _o_ shape. “That’s terrifyingly dangerous of you, Dallon.”

“What’s terrifyingly dangerous is the fact that you two speak my name so often as if I’m not really here, but I am, and I will remain to be. I’m not concerned with those statistics, because as much as we are doomed to six feet under the rock solid dirt, life is a privilege if you can play it right, and I’m determined to do just that.”

Expeditiously recovering from the shock of my apparent death wish, Brendon centers his gaze on me. “Then I hope you prevail.”

~~~~~

**A/N: this is like the only chapter with ryan like why didn't I include more of him he is m yFavE**

**aesthetic: the entire Kill Your Darlings movie (I'm going to write a fanfiction about it because I'm fucking trash)**

**~DakillyourdarlingsineedalifeIveliterallywatcheditseventimessinceafewdaysagopleaseiamsuffering**


	11. my plot says yes but my readers say no

I’m nervous out of my mind, out of my terrible mind, out of my amnesic mind that has failed me more times than it has helped me, as not even numbing the pain of what I did is enough, because there are still people who were more devastated by the tragedy than I was, and I shouldn’t be so selfish to assume that my own life’s destruction was most catastrophic for me, for I wouldn’t be there to witness it before I sank six feet under the dirt with no recollection of _how_ I sank.

And that’s very much like my current situation, although my heart is still beating, and my pulse is still fluttering like a moth weaving circles through my blood, and my muscles are still retrieving strength from their stock so that I may move, but beside of that, I have no idea who I was before I attempted to kill myself, no idea who I am even now, because I have retained no foundation upon which to build myself up again, so I lie here in the rubble and the ash and the shards of broken glass from the ocular window to my soul whose blue jay tint is now fluctuating out of ambivalence, but now it hoists a flashing color stained by my impenetrable terror at what’s transpiring this very instant.

I’m accompanying Brendon to his home to meet the sister who has ostensibly been horrifically shaken up by my suicide attempt, and she will no doubt be enraged by what I’ve done to both her and her brother, accepting no apologies no matter how sincere and frightful they are. I desperately ache to tell Kara that I _am_ sorry, from the bottom of my perpetually kicking heart that’s kicking faster now,I suppose these are just preconceived notions and shouldn’t be trusted, but when has my mind ever trusted rationality anyway?

Nothing I have done to this remote family of two is justifiable by whatever wild apology I have mustered inside of my head beforehand so that I’ll be prepared when I obviously break down at the confrontation of this girl whom I ruined with my absence, but I shouldn’t be thinking about myself in these circumstances, because she’s the one who was sobbing for at least a week after I tried to kill myself.

I have enacted many unintelligent decisions, most of which I deeply regret at night when the memories of childhood occasionally flood back to me and ignite a party of cringing, and then I begin to think how much they impacted those around me, how much my actions may seem like they follow after a thought but really are spurred by my insufferable impulsiveness.

For example, when one should reverse a tape, what they would see first is the effects, such as the echo and then the noise produced by their actions that proceed afterwards. The last thing they would see is a silent function performed only inside of their mind. This just proves that a human’s decision making skills have always been last of their priorities, and it is only when your life is in reverse, when you are falling apart in disarray, that one realizes this.

I am beginning to understand this concept, however abstruse it is, but life of all things is abstruse, so I should place myself in the duty to sort through its complexities while I’m conversing with Brendon’s litter sister who will surely tear me to shreds, because I recognize that I messed up, and I messed up real badly, so I guess it’s only fair that she should win the opportunity to rip me apart like a lion trained on savagery, albeit nothing can compare to the horrors I forced upon the only people who cared for me in this world. That’s unforgivable, but I’ll labor to make amends, because that’s the kind of weak person I am.

And it’s not as if I’m endeavoring to fix any of my weak qualities, only improve things in my life and improve things in others’ lives as an afterthought if I succeed at the first, when really it should be the other way around, because I’m irreversibly doomed to selfishness and phobia and everything that nobody would ever want, but others still retain a hope that I can work with.

It’s not my job to help people through their insecurities, but I feel that they deserve to be aided, and I deserve to be strained while doing that for them after all of the other things I’ve done, so I just need to step up, rid myself of paranoia, and only after those prerequisites are completed thoroughly, then I can approach Kara with the goal of reconciliation fresh in my mind, ‘cause nothing else is.

As we scale the stairs to Brendon’s house that he shares with his sister and in which he acts like a parental guardian, he doesn’t seem to notice my anxiety all that deftly. He doesn’t notice that I am scalding from the hellfire I am placing myself into intentionally when I think it’s just an accident in which my mind has tumbled, and it’s not like I can expect him to cure anxiety when that’s something that can only be mitigated with the slight chance of a fiery relapse, but I had at least trusted him to understand how it is. Maybe _he’s_ just anxious about _me_ being anxious, and he simply doesn’t want to accost me because he’s scared. Whatever. I can figure it out on my own. He did it when I was gone. It should be a piece of cake.

Roping a hasty glance and directing it towards me before unlatching the door from its hinges, Brendon steps inside of his orchid-scented house, dragging me with him without worrying if I’m petrified of what lies behind the threshold.

Brendon’s sister is nothing intimidating from what I can see by the doorway, only curled up on the couch with a book, a blanket shrouding her minuscule figure as she’s helplessly engrossed in the enchanting words upon the pages as dry as my store of prior memories, and this only partially soothes my throbbing, irrational fear of this young woman.

Kara looks up from her book with a classic science fiction cover jacket, and what she predicted was the arrival of her brother just like any other day, but what she imbibes is the person she hasn’t seen in over a month, the person who shattered her life with the shock of it all to increase the flame, the person she’s missed ever since then and hasn’t stopped missing, utilizing poetry to assist her grief towards remission.

At first, she doesn’t believe that I’m real, that I’m here, her chocolate eyes sounding a silent alarm, but after a few seconds, she rises from the couch and dashes towards me, relieved that I’ve returned for her.

“Dallon!” she exclaims, arms laced around me like a corset, and that binding is not at all exaggerated, because she’s elated at my presence in her home that was so empty of peppermint for the past four weeks, and I can’t condemn her for that, as she was utterly broken by my murder attempt.

I always thought there was something I could do for the people around me, the people who were generous to stay even when I wouldn’t, but now I know the truth: you can’t fix broken things. Believe me — I’ve tried. But the only reason we attempt to restore them, even through all of their insecurities and all of their faults and all of their untrusting eyes etched like daggers, is because we still have faith in their future, and I just think that’s neat. That’s what I’m implementing in the existences of Kara and Brendon, just a faith in their future and nothing more because I can’t _do_ anything more, so I pray that it will be fruitful.

“Hey, Kara!” I reply, though nothing correlated to her personality and her relationship to me stirs in my mind.

Brendon, twisting his hands together like a damp towel, nervously reminds his sister, “Kara, he doesn’t remember anything, which means he doesn’t remember _you_ , either.”

Only the humblest craters of damage strikes her face before fleeing to make way for a pragmatic disposition as a coping mechanism, although she’s still on my trail for answers. “Dissociative amnesia? Head trauma?”

How has she determined this so expeditiously? For me, this sort of discovery required days of researching and figuring out why I was robbed of my core memories, though it may have been something I needed at the time, so she must be the queen of the school if only they ruled by level of intellect.

Kara is rapidly alternating the subject, but her roots are still tucked in melancholy. “Remember when you promised me you would take us to France one day? If you don’t, well you left before that could occur, and therefore that vow was terminated, so are you willing to uphold the promise finally?”

That seems like something I would do, seeing as I love France and most aspects of its culture, and I would be honored to fly to Bordeaux with my best friends from before the incident perspired chaos upon me and my close ones, but the trick is that I don’t know anything about her.

However, if Brendon trusts her, then I should trust her as well, so I’m agreeing with only a smidge of doubt, because I’ve already screwed everything up, and I don’t need anything else on the record suiting my eventual conviction. In addition, this young woman emanates the impression that she’s good company, and her brother will be there with her in case she begins to hate me for either what I did a month ago or who I’ve become afterwards, so this should be fully functional.

“I’ll call my parents to see if you two can stay with me at the house in Bordeaux, if you want. Armistice Day is advancing, and we usually hold a celebration for that, so it’s a perfect time to visit.”

The lamp in Kara’s irises blossoms into new life, irrevocably pleased. “That would be fantastic! I can’t tell you how much this means to me.”

I seek forgiveness, and on the coast of Bordeaux, France is where it lies. For now, at least, I have ambition.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: this chapter is...,,,,too much
> 
> actually it's too little like why am I like this, always confining myself to 1500 words wtf I just want it to be over because I hate writing
> 
> aesthetic: the philosophy of metaphysics
> 
> ~Dakototalitarian-societies-are-not-healthy-for-a-metaphysicist


	12. mother Kenneth

I’ve been utterly excited about this trip to France, about showing my new friends every landscape and every monument that I’ve witnessed every day as a child, but I’m also a bit apprehensive about returning to my home, especially because I haven’t seen my family since I became the amnesic host of continuous obsessions.

Notwithstanding, I am still in my bedroom in Kenny’s house, packing my suitcase for the trip back to memory lane that might as well jog my memory or else be rendered ineffective and dull, and I’m fully suited to fly towards the first country in which I resided, where everything was better than placebo pills and suicide and being forgotten by my own mind.

My suitcase jars against its sides with a click, signaling that I am all prepared to return to my home in Bordeaux with my newest friends, leaving my _first_ friend since I was stripped of my memory and was forced by desperation to live with him, but it’s been a treat nonetheless, because there are no prior complications to nudge a barrier between us.

It seems that now I am terrified of my past, because if my old friends all hated me for what I did in it, then it should be incredibly monstrous. How can I forgive myself when I don’t even accept others people’s apologies? I have shoved my companions into so many situations that no one can ask of their friends, but they somehow survived, and I shouldn’t be dictating that if they can survive that then they can survive anything else, but I sure as hell might applaud them for their efforts, at least.

And then there’s the present. Now most people would assume that the present is an amazing concept, for you can shape your whole life in the moments placed before you. However, the present is always moving. You are never in the present for very long, because each second is splitting into millions upon billions of other times in an infinite string, so are we ever really in the present at all? It’s remarkably confusing, and the present isn’t a gift as kindergarten teachers proclaim that it is. The present is something you’re scared of because you don’t know if things get better or not from here, don’t know if you should just swallow a cyanide pill and get on with it. I don’t trust the present.

I am afraid of my future, too, what it holds for me. Will Brendon have abandoned me like I abandoned him, even if it’s a fair trade? Will Kara hate me after coming to her senses that I was a terrible person and probably _remain_ to be a terrible person? Will Kenny be fired from the only job that has supported him bountifully until we’re living on the streets where he found my mutilated body? I don’t know, and I hate not knowing, and I hate that my instability in my moral character has led me to the point where not knowing is like stumbling blindfolded into the street.

On the contrary, Kara and Brendon and I have scheduled a trip to France that I surmise will be absolutely lovely, and there’s nothing I can see in that future that would be harrowing, so I need not focus on the perpetual plagues of simply existing, and I drag my suitcase downstairs to part with Kenny at the door.

“Stay safe. The airports can be dangerous. Call me if you need anything.” Though Kenny’s countenance is soaked in worry, his sentences are concise and straight to the point, which most likely signs that he’s even more worried than I had first thought.

In an attempt to calm his anxiety of my departure, I mesh his stiff figure in a sturdy embrace for longer than is necessary to say goodbye, but it’s just my way of clarifying that I’m so grateful for his presence in my life and everything that he’s done for me, and leaving doesn’t mean that I’m sick of seeing him.

Kenny draws Brendon near him, and Brendon complies reluctantly, being unsure of what Kenny needs him for but respecting my guardian enough to trust him. “Keep him safe, will you? Make sure he doesn’t get hurt.”

Kenny, the anxious mother, the overprotective mother, the mother I wish I had grown up with instead of my real one back in France where we’re visiting today, who never really was much of a help to my perplexed mind becoming more perplexed with each year until I was thirteen and removed myself from my family’s life completely by abstaining from taking pictures of myself to make it seem as though I was already dead, because I was sure that I would be soon.

And I feel like my family would be more devastated if they knew this, rather than blaming me for being a petulant child who’s either self-conscious or stubborn and nevertheless won’t partake in collective photos besides the mandatory shoot at school for the yearbook, but none of that matters, because they have no idea what I was planning since I passed into the teenage years, and it’s better that way.

I’m going back to my childhood home, and my parents will be clueless about what I’ve done before the incident. Perfect.

A rumbling noise penetrates the ebony asphalt of the airport runway, stirring the more fearful thoughts of my mind as they ponder if we’ll crash, if we’ll be notably late to the terminal in France, if we’ll all suffocate in a freak of an accident, but all of this is birthed from illogical beginnings, so I elect to ignore the apprehension with every ounce of my will.

There are more important details upon which to focus, including the vast ocean approaching our expectant eyes widened by ecstasy, the ocean that will ship us to an unexplored terrain of broken stereotypes and a functional economy and every section of land that I once called home before my home was in Brendon’s cozy place in Nevada that I abandoned for stupid reasons.

I’ve always enjoyed airplane flights if I don’t think about the rude people you’ll find anywhere in the world, as I can read or write or draw throughout the prolonged hours, every possibility for a good time of quietness and repose clutched in my hands. My friend, however, is not as pleased by the flights, and Brendon’s legs clang against the seat cushions of the airplane headed all the way to Bordeaux, which is an extremely long flight and longer if you’re nervous like Brendon is, but he has in no way vocalized his phobia to me, though I intend to calm him anyway, because I understand how it feels to be scared out of your mind, and in my case it was to the point of near death, so it’s my duty to be sympathetic.

Extending a hand towards my companion’s jittering knee, I labor to console him. “Hey, Brendon, are you all right?”

Brendon glances confusedly down at the leg that I’ve clamped restfully to the leather of the chair, as if he had no recollection of bouncing his knee in sync with his anxiety. Disorders can be like that, though, with their erratic patterns and befuddlement of the psychologists who try to help the patient, but I am actually aware of the symptoms of anxiety and experience them myself, and I am also aware that Brendon may be oblivious to the fact that he was tapping his leg until I reminded him of it, and he’s just now deciphering what he was doing.

Kara couldn’t have informed him of his anxious activities, as she’s consumed in a different book than she was reading when I saw her last, and both are enormous in the layers upon layers of crisp sheets packed with words words to transport her to a new reality beyond this crummy old airplane, so she doesn’t care at all about the poor circumstances of her brother’s mental health.

I can surmise that Kara has never been a big proponent of helping him anyway, so I task myself with completing what she never could, hitching my attention to Brendon as I wait for him to explain his fear of riding on an airplane, even if that airplane is riding towards a brighter location.

A pin of saliva parks in Brendon’s throat, clogging any chance of a clear composure. “Y-yeah, I just...I get nervous during flights, because crashes are, um, what you’d call...not really my forte.”

This is when Kara temporarily abstains from reading and glimpses our conversation with eyes as slitted as the sanguin aftermath of a dagger upon flesh, and I don’t really know why she’s so malevolent towards this situation all of the sudden, because if she heard Brendon’s previous sentence then she must’ve heard the rest of the discussion, though she wouldn’t react when her brother was nervous, so this must be significant enough for her to pause her reading excursion to imbibe the venomous words leaking out of our mouths.

“Are you serious, Brendon? Crashes aren’t your forte?” Kara’s expression is cemented in antipathy, unwavering and stone cold, and Brendon shifts away from her acerbic stare. “How dare you even bring that up?”

“I was just trying to provide Dallon with some answers. He deserves a few of those after what happened.”

I’m not certain what I’ve been roped into, now only experiencing the odd poking of toes in between the seats to be paired with my fear, but I at least comprehend that it’s not as pleasant as I would like, so I retreat into my shell and allow the ponderous airplane flight to blanket me in the comforting fleece of sleep.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I was in the car with my friend and my brother was shoving his feet in our faces from the back seat and then she asked if I would include someone poking their feet in between the chairs in the story that I was outlining (which was this one) so that's why there's that random part at the end because I forgot until the last mintue lmao
> 
> aesthetic: screaming every time I see Norman in Kill Your Darlings because it looks like the grown up version of my friend's ten year old mouthbrother (haha nice pun dakota hahaha!!11!1!)
> 
> ~Dakotaffy


	13. your son calls me daddy too

I’m such a fucking idiot. I am _such_ a fucking idiot. Why did I have to drag Dallon into the mess that is my family situation? Why did Kara have to overreact to the slight mention of a crash? Why did I have to be so anxious in the first place? After all of this familial acerbity, Dallon didn’t speak for the rest of the plane ride, only burrowed himself in his sketches and in his pencils and in his erasers that he wishes he could erase his life with, building it up with graphite passion and then knocking it over like a loaned set of play blocks because you can’t keep what you create forever.

Dallon didn’t need any of this, and neither did I. We could’ve worked through my anxiety of soaring through the air and spent the rest of the flight talking about whatever it is that has infected our mind at the present moment, and it would’ve been just splendid. I could forget about my phobia and my parents and my worry for how Dallon will respond to his arrival in Bordeaux, but Kara just had to interject with the elucidation of a point I purposely made subtle so as to not draw attention to my lost cause of a personality.

It’s not like I can go back now, because no human has invented a time machine yet, and of course if they did, it would be absolutely terrifying with the frenzy of this freshly enlightened population, but even so, I wish I could rent it out privately if it ever did exist, as I wasted the dreary flight on being silenced by the umbrage of my little sister.

The entire flight is over, and we’re at the terminal at the moment, recently having heaved our suitcases off of the assembly line for personal items, and all that’s left to do is find Dallon’s parents, whom he said would be waiting for us by the luggage drop off with a sign that broadcasts his name.

I’ve never met the folks before, and I’m absolutely fearful of doing so. This would be different if Dallon were aware that I’m his boyfriend — because after he returned we basically just set back the clock towards friendship for now — as I would no doubt be forced to endure the long-winded speech about how I should be kind to him and afterwards the malicious stares intended to be discreet but are far from it, but ever since he materialized in my life again, we haven’t been so intimate as to label ourselves as an item.

I know that there’s some sort of love hiding in the corners of our minds, and really I never _stopped_ loving Dallon, but the question is if Dallon stopped loving _me_. With an amnesic mind it’s easy to do that. I feel something within our battered hearts, something that can’t be ignored yet something that is strangely amorphous like it’s meant to be shielded. However, I have no idea how to name that love, so I’m waiting for the perfect opportunity when it is all made clear to me what the hell this is.

Dallon’s fears of what we share have been somaticized into a fragment of a person, into a well of amnesia, damaging him beyond compare, and when the damaged people are falling, they imagine that they are flying, except the chains binding them to the floor have weakened their wings, and the hearts accepting that fate are shutting down. They can only be free when their body is absorbed into the pavement, when their parting smile hides the fact that this demise is what they desired all along, and they’ve finally won the perverse game of life. Dallon has forever known this strange abyss, and I fret for his welcoming back into his childhood home, because his parents are utterly unaware that he’s bathing in melanoid venom, and in his perception it should stay that way.

And that’s why when he greets his parents at the luggage drop off, a smile is the salient expression upon his angelic face usually coated by latent desperation, and it’s a peculiar sort of veneer, with a sensation of annoyance whipping me for no reason other than stubborn mental illness, because this isn’t him, and he’s wallowing in a lie to protect those who never gave a single shit about him, but he’s an integrous person, so it just makes this all the more frustrating, as there’s nothing else he could possibly do.

“Dallon!” My friend’s mother calls, her French accent much thicker than his. She extends her arm for an embrace, which he awkwardly supplies, even if he knows more about his family than he knows about me. Dallon’s parents are not focused on my unstable figure, which is both a blessing and a curse, because on one hand I don’t want to steal their attention from the son who almost died and simultaneously behold this mess of a person who will be living with them for the time being, but on the other hand it’s like I’m invisible, albeit I should be used to that vocation anyway.

All I do is gather the stimuli being cast towards my pupils for processing, because I don’t want to intrude. Kara does the same, though she’s less interested in what’s happening, intermittently checking her phone for texts from the infamous Breezy Douglas, so it’s really like I’m alone.

“You must be Brendon,” a young woman greets with her hand outstretched towards me and the resemblance to Dallon insurmountable, though her disposition is far brighter than Dallon’s, and if she’s an artist like he is, then she’s one who paints to pass the time, not because of the totalitarian madness flowering in her lovely brain.

My head is flicking around in every direction, examining my surroundings to assure myself that this is reality, that I am safe with Dallon and his family. “Yeah, that’s me.”

A side grin marinates upon the edge of the woman’s lips, attempting to calm the conversation with small talk. “Are you nervous?”

I glance back at Kara, who is observing as both scenes unfold, Dallon and his parents plus me and Dallon’s sister (I think her name is Elle, from what I remember), and she’s doing much better than I am, but she doesn’t have anxiety, and I’m nevertheless freaked out by this unfamiliar land.

“Yeah, extremely nervous.”

“Aww, well that’s okay.” She leans in closer to me, conveying a secret. “To be quite honest, I’m a little nervous, too.”

I wish to inform her that my anxiety should not be regarded as a minuscule flaw in my character, because it’s chronic and debilitating and will cause me much anguish down the road, but I’m just being an intractable fool like I often thought Dallon to be before I realized that everything he did was calculated to culminate in an astonishing suicide, and his sister is a nice enough person, so I shouldn’t be so rude to her. It’s time to search for my chill.

Dallon’s parents then turn to me, taking me by surprise. As far as I knew, I would stay in my position of conversing with Elle, because she’s the least anxiety-provoking person of all of Dallon’s family, but I obviously can’t avoid meeting the elders. That would just be stupid, although I’m a very stupid kid, yet excuses are the chipping walls for the guilty, and they aren’t functional.

“Brendon, nice to meet you!” Mr. Weekes exclaims, much like an overenthusiastic suburban dad from America, hurling a hand over my shoulder and weaving vibrations through my bones.

Dallon detects my apprehension around this situation, but he only guards a concerned countenance to supplement when he folds into himself to appear smaller and innocent when evidently he is not, because where is he to help? Not even Kara cares, only infatuated with digital bubbles and the rampant memes stored inside of them.

“Um, yeah, it’s nice to meet you, too, sir.” My vision is elsewhere, any location except the hollow eyes of Mr. and Mrs. Weekes, and I soon am cognizant that Dallon has sneaked up behind me in case I need someone loaded with consolation, and that sure is him.

Ever since he returned, he’s been estranged from me, and I have no idea why. Does he feel bad for what he did? Does he hate me now that he’s basically another person? Even though Dallon has altered his personality, however minimally, I am still as fascinated with him as I was before, and maybe that’s because he abandoned me and I just need comfort, but maybe he’s not so different from who he was before the incident. I’m still reaching for that prospect, and it is my faith that during this vacation in Bordeaux, Dallon will find himself again.

He’s close enough, from what I can see. He’s nearing me as if he’s warming up to this old friend of his, and I’m thankful for that. I want to rekindle the ancient flame we once shared through art and psychology and the birds gambolling in the sky, but if that damages Dallon’s health, then as his companion I shall leave him alone to recover. I hope the best for him, because he was the one who downed placebo pills every day, the one who washed up in an alley with a murder weapon in his system, the one who missed the only goal he prayed he would achieve, the one who thought he was a total failure and wanted to die and became even more of a failure in his perception because he wasn’t adept enough to stay dead.

I can save him from that. Even better, I can help him save himself from that, and Bordeaux is the perfect place for it.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I hate this chapter title oh my fuck
> 
> aesthetic: polaroid photos
> 
> ~Daddota


	14. this is when cannibalism occurs, right?

When Dallon told me we’d be journeying to his house in Bordeaux, I thought it would only be a medium sized cottage in the middle of nowhere, like any French house should be in my stereotypical perception of them, and it’s no doubt in the middle of nowhere, but that’s only because it’s too grand to be plugged into a measly neighborhood. I had not expected such a massive display of decadence with the estate’s luxurious acres, healthy grasses sprouted upon every terrain surrounding the building, everything from a movie.

It’s still taken me a while to process all of this, all of the wonders I’ll be experiencing throughout my stay in the house of strangers who I should know but don’t, but even Dallon doesn’t know them all that well, and they’re his parents, so I should be fine.

Yes, they’re a bit nerve wracking. Yes, they’re a bit formal. Yes, they’re a bit provincial. But that’s to be inferred from people like this, people who Dallon abandoned partially for the same reasons I just listed, though we’re back again, this time in their elegant dining hall with the producers of Downton Abbey chasing our tails.

Each plate strewn about the cherry surface is as immaculate as a woman’s lipstick, shining and vibrant with the spear of porcelain edging through them. The chandelier suspended above us twirls a radiant beam towards us, onto every perfectly placed utensil and every napkin folded by Elle into a dexterous swan and every ember of prosperity for November flickering in our souls. Wine glasses spring from all spots at the table, enriched by a sparkling meteor shower of champagne that I would never have received back in America, which is a sign that chance is coming, and this is a splendid one that I’ll welcome wholeheartedly.

Dallon’s parents have left me alone for the time being, which my anxiety interprets as both a good and a bad thing, because they aren’t tormenting me with questions I can’t answer, but they may also be secretly conversing about me or may even hate me already. Dallon, however, is being the gentle boy I know he his by discreetly calming me down with reassuring mantras and pats on the knee mailed sporadically.

And for the time being, I think I’m fine. I really do, because Dallon is with me, but of course nothing lasts forever, and his parents’ cunning attention is now on me.

“So, Brendon, tell me. Why did you make Dallon try to kill himself?” This is the first thing they say to me since the genesis of this lovely dinner, and it’s a sentence so rotten that it then spoils the mood Elle strived so miraculously to assemble.

A blockage solidates my throat until I’m an amorphous container of gelatin with no emotions, no feelings beyond astonishment, because Dallon’s parents could not be any more wrong than they are now. I did nothing to Dallon Weekes besides help him, and though that help did not succeed in the end, it’s a fool’s move to try and erase it.

But I cannot tell Dallon’s parents these things, as I’m choked and stuttering with the only clear air I can expel. I have never been able to voice my opinion, not even now, as there’s a physical obstruction in my lungs and in my stability and in everything that I was amassing in order to utilize, but all of those items are broken now.

Dallon recognizes my plea for assistance, face brushed with the sharp wind of offense, and he drags me up from the table before I can collapse entirely, shouting back to his parents in the coldest tone he can fabricate, “We’re going to the bathroom.”

Dallon’s Point of View

My parents are insolent and blatantly disrespectful to the youth, but I didn’t realize it would go this far. Brendon is unfamiliar to them, which means that they don’t know the first thing about his personality, his morals, his character that’s so developed that it’s a wonder he’s not honored in the Hall of Fame or awarded a medal for his valor, and the old people in this house should not blame Brendon for things they have no proof that he did or did not do.

It’s completely absurd that he would lure me into a suicide attempt. This isn’t the tragedy of Lucien Carr and David Kammerer where stalking or assault was on the table. We loved each other, and once I loved him more than I know, and yes, my amnesia has taken that from me, but I still remember that something must have been there, something as vivid as the dashing hues of red and pink cupping the falling sun as it says goodbye. Brendon is not a stranger to me as he is a stranger to my parents, and he stuck around because he was utterly devoted to me and my well being. What kind of person who did so much for me would also tempt me into suicide?

Brendon Urie was the love of my life back in September when I was gambling with my very existence as if it were expendable, and I suppose none of that has changed one bit. I believe that I do, in fact, love him, and maybe it’s not the same kind of love, but it’s love nevertheless, a love that cannot be neglected by stress or the ostentatious fever dreams of the decomposing.

So as I guide him to the bathroom glowing heartily with alabaster tiles, I understand that it is my duty to aid this man as much as he once aided me and continues to aid me even now that I’m a happier person for the sole reason that I don’t remember a time when I was overdosing nearly every day, only store it with the memories of people claiming that’s how things operated in September.

Brendon is quivering all around, within the rose of his lips, through the strawberry leaves of his fingers, the fortress of his arm onto which I’m latching to pull him down the hall, and I absolutely abhor that he’s so shaken up by what rude accusations my parents vomited on him, but the bathroom is still down the corridor, and that’s where everything will be resolved. Currently, however, this sensation is hell.

Bursting through the door to the bathroom, Brendon finds his way to the ledge of the bath, planted down on the solid material to add some gravity to his floundering life, and I soon follow after closing the aperture to mask the tears I can assume are mobilizing already.

“D-Dallon,” he begins, hammered by misplaced guilt and lachrymose thoughts. “Dallon, I didn’t mean t-to...” That’s when he completely crumbles like a powerful civilization being swept away by a volcano of illness that not even I, the most important person in his life, can cure, and it’s heartbreaking, you know? Because someone I conjectured was strong enough to withstand the hell I threw at him is not actually that strong, though I still tossed that burden his way like it was impossible that he could ever fail, but now his heart is failing, and his faith in me is failing, and everything he thought he knew is fucking failing, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

So in the only action I can think of, I hold him, but it is ambiguous, for I do not know him, but I know that he is real and living and with me right now, and his soul is as aching as mine. But perhaps I would like to know him in the future, and perhaps I already do. He has been calling to me since the beginning, and my eyes have been calling to his lips, so I decide that it’s time to seal the gap.

Time is nothing in this moment, the twelve pages of a calendar flying back and back, more and more of those calendars piling up and being swept away into nothingness, because they no longer exist, and it comes to a point where time is no longer relevant anyway, where the only thing that matters is the marriage of orchids and peppermint, the sun and the moon, broken people and amnesic minds, but even that doesn’t faze me, because no supplemented conditions can shove in between us. It is purely Brendon Urie and Dallon Weekes, as it was all the way in September, and it will forever be Brendon Urie and Dallon Weekes as long as we live.

But splendid things cannot endure erosion, as the pitter patter stamped into the wooden panels of the floor is unknown to me until the door is pushed open by my sister, who is witnessing this whole scene of homoeroticism, and all she can say is: “Does _Maman_ know you’re gay?”

My jaw slackens in the abrupt awareness that my mother is even more homophobic than my father is, but I can trust Elle to hoard the secret like she’s hoarded many others. “No, and you won’t tell her.”

“Fair enough.” With that simple sentence of only two words, my sister is out the door again to return to appeasing my parochial family and Kara, who has been silent for the duration of the meal or conceivably too stunned by the extravagance of this manor, and Brendon and I are alone again.

I glance back at him, at that honeyed face of crying and prior betrayal, and form a promise with lips still salty from his tears. “I’ll stay with you in here until you’re ready, okay?”

And all he does is tie his eyes to his hands like he’s ashamed of looking at me. Whatever’s most comfortable for him, I guess.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I started writing this in Brendon's POV and then found a quote I was saving but it was in Dallon's POV so here we go for the first POV change within a chapter woohoo i'm suffering
> 
> aesthetic: the vibe from abandoned hospitals, the eerie sort of thing
> 
> ~Dakotape


	15. buttnuts roasting on an open fire

The flames are performing for me, or so it is in my perception, because no one else has ever been so kind, for even Dallon Weekes, the love of my pathetic little life, abandoned me for solitude, and it became a frequent occurrence to sit by the fireplace at home with Kara and speculate on why the hell this happened and why the hell I deserved it.

This time, on the contrary, the flames are much prettier, vaccinated with crimsons and sunflowers and vermilions and tied up into a beautiful bow of stone circumscribing the roots of their scarlet electricity. This time, there’s no available space to wonder why Dallon departed so abruptly, because he’s back now, and that’s all that matters to me, so I’m not going to pester him about his decisions, however misguided they may be. This time, I’m with Elle, who is a sister but is not _my_ sister, and she changes things up while Kara is in the living room and Dallon is aiding his parents in cleaning the dishes. This time, there’s the charming estate in Bordeaux, France to waft the fragrance of pine and smoke and ash onto my skin still rouged by the kiss I shared an hour ago.

Ah yes...I know it well, even if it was fleeting and interrupted and mashed by the melancholy of being blamed for something I was endeavoring profoundly to prevent more than anybody else was, and that kiss was absolutely extraordinary. It didn’t feel like all of our other kisses, back when Dallon could actually remember them, because those were secure. We assumed that nothing could damage our relationship, that nothing would wrench us apart besides our own eventual distaste for each other which would be completely understandable. But this kiss has finally accepted that things _did_ damage our relationship, yet we were never wrenched apart, not even by the ailment of dissociative amnesia.

We’ve been staring at the sky for the entire duration of this mellow excursion, admiring how each day the moon tips out a bit of light to hide behind insecurities and secrecy and gradually builds it back up again, and truly it is a spectacular phenomenon, but Elle concludes that it’s finally time to speak, because this silence is becoming a bit unnerving to the both of us.

“I’m sorry about what happened during dinner,” she apologizes, gnarling her hands in her lap to occupy her nervous mind.

Yeah, I’m sorry about what happened during dinner, too. I have been nothing but gracious to Dallon’s parents since they greeted me at the airport, yet they still do not favor me. They thought I fucking killed their son, when I would be the last person on earth to enact such a monstrous deed. Shouldn’t they be grateful that their son is simply alive? They did nothing for him, and I did, and that’s why only I can expect more in certain areas. They cannot, so it appears that resentment is their suitable tactic.

I snatch my focus from the fire and redirect it towards her, partially out of surprise, partially out of tiny flakes of spite, partially out of a need for a reconciliation that isn’t her job to deliver but is flying from her mouth anyway. I don’t say anything, though, only wait for her to continue, and she almost doesn’t, but she then recognizes that I’m not wasting my words on fallacy, so she carries on.

“I understand that my parents don’t like you, and I really have no idea why, but I want to make it clear that I am so grateful for your presence in Dallon’s life. You really helped him. He used to only sit in his room all day, never talked to people, and I know that may not mean much to you, because you immediately saw the effects of Dallon’s happiness where I didn’t, in addition to the fact that the only other thing you saw was when he ended up almost killing himself, but I’m incredibly thankful to you for helping him anyway.”

I’m just about to giggle maniacally, but that’s apparently rude, even when someone has no fucking clue what they’re talking about and it’s so bloody hilarious to see them try to decipher things that they will never comprehend, because Elle Weekes, Dallon’s very own sister, doesn’t know anything about what transpired in Las Vegas. She wasn’t there, and she wasn’t truly there in Bordeaux when Dallon was, either, so he was permitted to fall, and somehow his family claimed that they were permitted to mourn him.

Not even I saw Dallon’s joy in a pure sense. I only wished for it and basically ignored the obvious truth that artists cannot be happy. They can _never_ be happy. Show me a gleeful artist and I’ll show you a mirror with the face of a liar printed in the glass. I thought Dallon to be many proficient things, but I should’ve known that a happy artist is an impossible label to achieve, even for him.

And maybe I could’ve _helped_ him achieve that, at least in a minor way, just scraping the line where humans can no longer pass, but he refused my help to instead drug himself with pills that never even functioned correctly for his specific purpose of fucking dying and deserting me and throwing himself to the shit he thought he assembled and needed to repent to, but he was not infested by venom at the start. He was consumed by it when he began to hate himself, and he pushed me away because of that pest under his skin.

I was physically unable to help him, yet some people are praising me for being this saint that I know I’m not, and it’s not like I can decline their offer of deifying me, because I’ve never been capable of poking my opinions into discussions, as no one really cares about me, and when they do, they only care about the _idea_ of me, so now it’s time for me to interject.

“What kind of help is it if he shoved it away?”

The young woman laughs halfheartedly, vocal cords slackening into a gloomy remembrance that I know all too well from dreary nights of pondering Dallon’s beauty and realizing that it’s no longer there. “I guess my parents were asking themselves the same thing. You shouldn’t worry about them, though. They’re always this conservative. There’s no fixing that in the near future, so you can just subtlety avoid them for the time being, and you should be fine.”

It seems so odd that Elle is warning me against her own parents, but if these were the parents who fucked Dallon up in the head, who made him feel unwelcome during his childhood, who repelled him from the home in which he stored all of his memories since he was born, then Elle’s warning is conceivable enough.

Nevertheless, I absolutely dread being scared of places in which I’m staying for a prolonged period of time, such as this quite magnificent house in Bordeaux, because then I am required to conduct myself in an astute manner so that I can observe each niche where my plan could go wrong, where I could be met with disapproval from those I’m laboring to shield myself against, and that would just be the end of me.

Dallon would protect me, but would Dallon be quite cognizant of where I’m coming from? He grew up in this place, and though it didn’t treat him very nicely, it’s still more of a home than a barn would be. But I suppose we’re all just searching for an escape, and Dallon is the master at locating them, ‘cause he can know things that you never would’ve suspected. He knows that he could have easily hanged himself with his scarf, but he didn’t, because that wasn’t psychology. That was suicide in its least diluted manifestation, and he didn’t like suicide when people called it that, even if it was its proper title. Truth is, he was hiding from his responsibilities as any teen blogger would, but he’s _not_ a teen blogger. He could be so much more, could _do_ so much more with the life he was given by oblivious parents who only brought him into this world so that he could figure shit out on his own, and he’s doing some of it adeptly, but some of it just tanks, and that’s all right, because he’s trying his best, and I’m so proud that he’s finally dug himself out of the hole he’s spent so long burying himself in.

But now I’ve found myself in a hole, and I’ll be in this hole until promptly after Armistice Day when we return to Las Vegas, and I pray that Dallon’s parents won’t guard him for themselves, because they sent him to America for a second chance, and he’s taken a third from suicide because he enjoys it there. He needs something to enjoy in his dreary existence, and perhaps it’s insensitive to call his existence dreary, but he’d agree with me. That’s why everything I do for him is so imperative to his survival, and that’s why his parents will not faze me.

~~~~~

**A/N: why do I go off on these tangents like they barely said anythign I'm fucik**

**aesthetic: people asking if the book I carry around is a journal because i'm always writing in it but boy do they know I'm outlining gay ass fanfics smh they'd be devastated**

**~Dakotaylorswift**


	16. (((ratatouille vibes)))

I am despising my parents right now much more than I’ve ever despised them, and that means a lot, because after seventeen years of their impenetrable opinions being drilled into my mind unsuccessfully, anger and spite are the only items inside of me, and somehow I remember it all, every dinner table discussion based around fallacy and bigotry, every school experience where my peers fucking agreed with their insolence, every fear of being caught in the mere act of existing, but those anecdotes don’t concern me anymore, as I’ve changed so much since moving to America that the troubled kid in Bordeaux is no longer part of my core identity, and it should remain that way, because back then I was actually afraid of my parents.

Now, on the contrary, all that I host is acerbity towards them, and there’s a shitton of it. Notwithstanding, I view myself as an integrous person now that I’m back from the dead, a person who won’t engage in drama just for something to do, so I prefer to stay away from my annoyingly conservative parents.

But when your parents ask you to clean the dishes with them, you can’t really decline that plea, because if you do, then they’ll whip out all of these cards about how they raised you and how they feed you and how they love you unconditionally, when in reality that’s their job and has been their job since they chose to have a child, and the child had no part in deciding if it would be born or not.

However, my parents are stubborn and as illogical as it gets, my theory being proved by the whole conversation at the dinner table about accusing an innocent man of my near death, and they won’t admit to their faults, so in any situation I am forced to help them wash the fancy plates they used to show off to someone they don’t even like.

Brendon is innocuous in any form. In fact, he’s more of a gentleman than my father is, more of a kind soul than my mother is, more of an artist than my sister is. He should not have been bombarded by my conservative parents’ harsh, preconceived notions that were released in the spur of the moment but aren’t regretted nevertheless. He should be protected from such atrocity, but alas I cannot protect him, because once I was the one who broke him, so does he even ache for my comfort? I’ll just defend him from afar, right here in the kitchen where my parents are tasking me with assisting them in their dish cleaning procedures.

And I guess it would all be fine if we were just washing the dishes in silence, pondering the reasons why we fucking detest each other like any family should, but that is not the case. The case is that my parents are attempting to talk with me, to sort out why we’re silent, to discuss what happened and why they will never be sorry for it and why now I have to carry it, even though it’s not my responsibility.

I’ve done my best to block them out, with their shrill voices of the French dialect that they’re still utilizing in a progressive world where I have abandoned speaking in the same language I spoke in when I was suffering as a child, but they continue to pester me, to nag me about how I’m such an intractable son, to try everything within a plethora so that I may speak, but what they’re doing is not persuading me towards them, rather picking and choosing aspects from disparate opinions and shoving them at me all at once.

It’s not working, because I’m not going to trust them, and maybe they’re simply looking out for me and my wellbeing, but this is not the way to do it. The way to do it also isn’t grabbing my arm and requiring me to address them, but that’s what’s happening, and my anger is insurmountable.

Grinding the tile below me with my feet wallowing in the energy I’ve collected out of spleen, I scream, “What the hell do you want?”

“Don’t talk to us like that,” my mother scolds me, this time in English, yet I’m just as tenacious about my opinion as she is about hers.

“I’m just trying to wash the dishes, okay? You asked me to, remember?” I pivot back to my activities once completing my sixty second quota for malevolence, piling a train of bubbles onto a plate and obliterating it with a sponge promptly afterwards.

“We just need to talk to you,” my father claims, now tucked partially behind my mother to signal that I am one party and they are another, that we are henceforth physically estranged.

Vision still bathing in the grimy water of the sink, I halt. “Then talk to me.”

My dad spoons a sigh out of his lungs before beginning, and I know exactly where this is going solely from that gesture. “I don’t think you should be hanging out with Brendon.”

And there it is, the money sentence. That should be his new catchphrase, ‘cause he’s saying it so often, and yet it’s still not true. Brendon has been a huge help to me since I immigrated to America and since I attempted suicide, and he’s taken it upon himself to stick around through all of it, though it hurt him, and it destroyed him, and it warped his mind so that it will never be as it was previously and he was fucking okay with that, because he believed in me, and it is definite that I cannot say the same about my parents.

“What, do you want to send him back to Nevada before Armistice Day?”

“No, that would be rude.”

I scoff. As if all of the other things they’ve done weren’t rude. As if they care about rudeness at all. As if they care about _me_ , because they abhor Brendon, but he is the person onto whom I’ve held for safety, and they’re not about to steal that from me. They’re not about to steal _him_ from me, and if they did, then I would return to Nevada along with him without so much as a word, because they do not deserve my explanation if I hate being here.

“Then what do you propose?”

“You’re stuck with him during his visit, but when you arrive back in Las Vegas, just drop him, Dallon. Drop him and don’t look back.”

I’m laughing internally so as to hide my real feelings towards this subject, because it’s just so fucking absurd. I’m not stuck with Brendon. I _chose_ to keep him with me, and it’s not even derived from a pity for his misshapen state, and if it is, then that’s justifiable, because I was the one who destroyed him, and now I’m the one who will mend him. In any case, I love him with an amorphous kind of adoration that I can’t pinpoint, but it’s as genuine as a soul placed into art, and he certainly is art, so pushing him away is a load of bullshit and a precursor to years of remorse down the line.

I spin away from the ocean of bubbles to approach them straightforwardly with my hands reclining against the porcelain of the sink. “Why would I do that?”

“Because he’s not good for you, _mon fils_ ,” my mother chimes in while draping herself in her most generous expression, though it couldn’t be more fake.

“How the hell would you know what’s good for me?” My mouth fries into a pucker, soured by the atmosphere and by my venom. “You didn’t give a shit before, and you don’t give a shit now.”

“Dallon, what are you talking about?” My mother’s brows are tense, as if suspended on a wire so that she won’t cascade into the web of lies she herself constructed. “You’re our son, and we love you.”

I lean in to deliver a steady flow of sound waves, undeviating and sharp like the dagger stabbing me since birth, now fixated upon my parents. “Bullshit.”

And it is then that my conveniently placed sister emerges from the hallway and stumbles upon our domestic incursion, eyes puffed at the sight. “Is this not a good time?” she stammers, pointing out into the hallway to ask if we want her to return there.

Instead, I brush past her while storming out of the underworld that is the kitchen, simultaneously deflecting the cries of my parents to get back here and chat with them about their parochial manners in which I’ve never been interested and have rejected all along, and in the foyer is where I locate a frenzied Brendon Urie, whom I cup in my hands and mix into like blood from two lovers intertwining as fingers might.

He’s cold, spat out by the ice and neglected by the sun, but he is enchanting and extraordinary and everything that I need, his lips upon mine for the second time this night so amazing yet never relinquishing its fervor for staleness, and I wish it were like this for everyone, for it is truly a magnificent concept to be loved without the brittleness of elongation distorting your idolatry to the point where you’re numb in each other’s fumbling clutches, but we’re nowhere near that yet.

Brendon’s lips are bittersweet with the insignia of champagne, and I can taste the universe upon them, closer than it has ever been, where it feels as though I can grasp it myself. Or maybe _Brendon_ is the universe, and it is clear that I actually do have him now.

“I’m never letting you go,” I promise, and I snare the solaced nodding of Brendon’s head colliding with the intensity of our grip on each other.

And my words, at least, are sincere.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: this is like the first chapter where I didn't consume the entire space with internal monologues and actually put in dialogue
> 
> aesthetic: dane dehaan's voice omg when will I be free
> 
> ~Dakotanningbed


	17. he'd rather ride dallon than this horse

I awake to a slap, but it’s definitely not a slap in human form, so I know that I haven’t done something to offend my companion. It’s some sort of clothing material, but I’m too damn lazy to unlatch my lids and see what it really is, so I only coast back into the beautiful sleep of Sunday morning and assume that what has struck me is either the sheets or my own disfigured limb now resembling the surface of textiles. It doesn’t matter. I’m fucking tired.

“Brendon!” Dallon calls, annoyed with my sluggishness.

Okay, so maybe those materials smiting me weren’t either of those aforementioned things, and maybe Dallon needs me for something, and maybe I’ll completely flop at it, but who really gives a shit? This is Bordeaux, where I’m snagging my second chance and Dallon is snagging his third, so really I can do whatever the hell I want, and I can do it with him by my side.

Nevertheless, I’m exhausted from the plane flight and from the dinner situation and from what succeeded that dinner situation, in addition to staying up most of the night to think about them as I reeled in brief flickers of Dallon’s hidden figure in the other bed, chest reaching and collapsing like an ocean wave and just as alluring, so I have no intentions of rolling from my mattress to actually do something.

But Dallon has been so kind to me since I met him again, especially for someone trying to figure out something as simple as who he is, and I should cut him some slack for that, because he certainly isn’t being treated very generously judging from yesterday’s ghastly events, so I grant at least a bit of the drawbridge to shuffle down.

I finally glimpse him now, standing at the base of my bed with his hands rooted on his hips, though my vision is partially shielded by the apparent horseback riding pants Dallon has tossed at me for whatever reason. Shouldn’t he know that I’m a failure at most sports? My coaches even told me that I should stick with academics and never placed me in games for the rest of the season. Riding is the most dangerous out of all of them, though I haven’t attempted to be a professional at it, but I haven’t attempted at all, so I could fucking fall off of the horse or something.

“Please get dressed,” Dallon commands, peeling back the covers blanketing my chilled body to speed up my awakening. “We’re going horseback riding.”

As I spill onto the hardwood floor, I notice that he’s donning the same pants he threw at my fucking face, in addition to a loose white shirt like it’s the godforsaken nineteenth century or some funky French shit, and he looks bloody fantastic in it, I must admit, though that’s not so much my forte.

“You can stick with your Deadpool t-shirt, Brendon,” Dallon permits, a minuscule chuckle singeing his tone as if my comfort is a joke, because in all honesty this shirt is an amazing clothing article for practically anything, despite it looking outwardly unprofessional. You can wear it anywhere, even horseback riding. Does Dallon not comprehend this?

Maybe he does. He’s probably just trying to give me something cozy to die in when I fall off of the horse. Fair enough, I suppose. At least he’s considerate.

~~~~~

The murky smell of the stables alone is enough to repel me, and I contemplate turning back and, but I’m already stuffed tightly into these horrific pants (which he calls jodhpurs, as if that makes any sense), and Dallon is gripping my hand with a fervor that suggests he’s never going to let me go, and I think I kind of enjoy holding his hand, even through the dirty walkways and the humming flies and the cackling horses whom I’ll be required to trust in order to ride them, though it doesn’t appear that they’re disposed towards trusting _me_.

I’m freaking out about simply touching a horse, whereas Dallon is completely calm as he strolls through the stables collecting carrots for the animals to nibble on with his palm extended flat and gathering the rough whiskers and the oral bacteria of his so called furry friends. I follow closely behind him for fear of being harmed by these creatures but never mentioning my phobia of them, because Dallon would obviously say I’m being childish. Some people would label them gentle giants, but they’re wriggling their heads all around and flaring their enormous nostrils and pounding the door with their rock hard hooves, so they don’t really seem so gentle anymore.

On one hand, I had prayed that Dallon wouldn’t acknowledge my struggles and call me a wimp, but on the other hand, I just want to be free of this equine hell. Neither of those things happen, because Dallon _does_ acknowledge my struggles, but he doesn’t do a single about them besides clap me on the shoulder and drill a familial glance at me to continue on with what he wants to do, not what _I_ want to do.

And I can’t really blame him, because he’s been serving the whims of his old friends ever since he got back from the falsified grave or whatever it was that he was doing for a month afterwards, and he deserves something pleasurable of his own, but I’m fucking suffering over here. If he wanted, I could just watch him ride from the sidelines like a soccer mom, and he’d be soaking up the fun of riding without worrying about picking up his dying friend after they tumble from the horse (it’s just a matter of time really).

However, he does not allow me such a dignity, as he’s guiding me towards a horse name Amorette, which I spy from the label near her door, whose coat is as slick and white as the advancing snow. “Little love,” Dallon whispers, glancing over at me with the sweetest adoration I’ve ever seen in my life, and with a leap of courage I never knew I could muster, I stretch to stroke her, and it’s not nearly as terrifying as I thought it would be, which is only partially a relief, because the most difficult part is riding her, and I haven’t approached that yet.

“I’ve already tacked her when I visited the stables before you were awake, so she’s all ready for you to ride.”

To an experienced rider, this is a benevolent gift bestowed upon them so that they may indulge in more time with their lovely horse with whom they share an inseparable bond. To me, that just means there’s a larger span of time where I can die. Dallon doesn’t understand this like he understands most other things, though this is the one thing he needs to know, and he doesn’t fucking know it, so there he is, leading Amorette out of her stall and brashly hoisting me onto her by grabbing my fucking knee and pushing my body towards the saddle, which surprisingly isn’t tilting to one side until I cascade to the stone flooring.

Next is Dallon’s horse, a stunning mare named Lourdes whose ebony coat is inconsolably stark against Amorette’s alabaster fitting, and after he mounts the majestic steed, everything is proceeding so rapidly against my vision.

“Squeeze your legs into the horse to get it moving,” Dallon instructs, head angled only slightly backwards to observe my trials.

To my astonishment, my horse and my skills are actually functional, and soon I’m walking through the grass towards the riding ring, where I will meet my doom, but maybe my doom has nice hair and I can learn from it while I’m cascading into the underworld.

My mind should be on fire, yet it is not, for whatever deluded reason. I’m settled into the saddle, absorbing my surroundings, which include the elegant posture of Dallon Weekes, who is somehow assured that I’m doing well behind him. That’s a bit of a misconception, but at least Amorette’s mouth isn’t glued to the grass like I’ve seen in beginner classes, and at least I haven’t poured to the ground yet.

Dallon glides through the gate and into the sand-filled arena (I’m calling it an arena because that’s where gladiators die, and though I’m not a gladiator, I’m going to die here), and he instantaneously employs a steady trot around the border, expecting me to follow when all I can do is walk and pretend like I’m not caving in. He bounces up and down in his saddle to the rhythm of the trot, and I try my best to imitate it.

“It’s called posting!” Dallon yells, now on the opposite end of the ring. “Squeeze your horse and do it yourself!”

I attempt to heed his advice, though unsuccessfully. It is only with the mighty fruits of being a bottom that my leg eventually inform my horse that it’s time to trot, and soon I’m up and down just as Dallon is.

My companion mails a smile to me, as broad as his horse’s obsidian flank, and it’s now evident that he actually believes in me and isn’t here solely to watch me fail at something he’s been training in for his entire life, because I’m actually gaining skills at it.

Maybe this isn’t so bad after all.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: remember when I tried to use musical notes in UCDF
> 
> yeah well I obviously abandoned that....too much work for a suffering writer....
> 
> aesthetic: my brother telling me I shouldn't eat too much of something or else I'll get fat when he literally ate that entire pack in one day why is he like this
> 
> ~Dacalories


	18. I aspire to be a sweater gay

If I doubted heaven before, then I no longer do, as being free of those ghastly jodhpurs, those spawns from the depths of the hell in which I now believe because of a comparison between the two, is the best thing in the world and even beyond the world, for this limited portion of existence is too bland to describe all that I need to describe about those fucking pants, and maybe there truly is a god in this universe who is watching over me and has granted me a reprieve from those tight pants that may or may not make my ass look pretty damn fine but are nevertheless abhorrent in every single way besides that one, and now that I have escaped, there’s another destination fresh in my mind.

Normally I would feel sordid and embarrassed to be sorting through my friends’ dressers, especially because they’re teenage boys with who knows what lurking in the creaking drawers, but Dallon is an innocent kid as far as I can tell, an innocent kid who most likely doesn’t stash those magazines the heterosexuals cleave to, and anyway, I need a sweater and some boy shorts to replace the lingering itch of the jodhpurs that Dallon forced me to wear, so even if there is something risky in the drawer, he deserves every event following my discovery of it. Nothing is worse than those goddamn pants. I could’ve just used jeans, but Dallon enjoys my suffering, so has there ever been a crack in the wall, a loophole, a kindness from a generally kind person?

One of my favorite clothing articles is the versatile model called the sweater, and as I plunder the fabric contents of Dallon’s drawers, those sweaters infiltrate in an unbridled abundance, practically dripping from the edge of the mahogany and into my hands desperate to forget the chafing material of the horseback riding pants that were completely unnecessary yet a part of my morning attire, and pressing the sweater to my face, I am so thankful that I have oozed from the iniquitous reign of the jodhpurs.

Dallon is waiting for me in his living room, where he is relaxing without the constraints of the jodhpurs after banishing them a few minutes ago, so I can spend as much time as I need, because it’s not like I want to see him since he plagued me with those pants that are intended to be stretchy but are just the fertile mother of ubiquitous rashes.

So when I peel the versatile Deadpool t-shirt from my body grimy with the atmosphere of the stables, it is conducted by the calming speed of a river trickling from its origin towards another destination, which would be the floor in this case and eventually the clothes hamper because I’m a considerate person who cleans up their mess and doesn’t push my friends into trouble with their parents, a trouble that they can’t avoid by sticking it to the veritable perpetrator. It’s soothing to operate at such a velocity where I can take my time and savor the grappling of the red fabric at my fresh skin exposed to the sunlight drizzling beauty over the room, and both the Deadpool t-shirt and the sweater plant goosebumps up and down my arms.

I glance down at the newly donned sweater and notice how fucking adorable it is, how fucking adorable it would be on Dallon, especially, how it doesn’t quite fit on me but would fit on him, although he injured me with the mere presence of those jodhpurs on my prickling legs, so I won’t allow him the pleasure, even if it sacrifices my pleasure, too.

With that, I proudly display my sweater outside of my companion’s bedroom, and I also note that sweater to be helplessly stained by the November theme of leaves and pumpkins but amazing nevertheless, and past the door I strut, all the way into the living room where Dallon anticipates my arrival and ultimately gasps when he spies it.

His focus is chained to me during my entire journey to him, and he eventually utters through stammering diction, “Damn, you look better in that than I ever do.”

“I sincerely doubt that, Dallon Weekes,” I negate, climbing into his lap crinkled in newspaper drafted by those dwelling in the secrets of his mother tongue who has hidden even me from its complexities and its cursing and its magnificent prose that I will probably never understand, but Dallon does, and he’s up to share, which I can deduce from the fact that he has no objection to my robbery of his sweater, rather an attraction to it.

We settle in the chair for seven seconds before I become stunningly aware that classical music is echoing in the background, its source the shining black record player at the other end of the room, crackling and composing and broadcasting the creative work of some of the greatest musical minds in history, though I cannot decipher which ones.

It’s beautiful, no doubt, but it’s foreign to me, just as everything in this place is foreign to me, ‘cause it’s France, but this sensation is rather a tantalizing one, where it’s teasing my mind on the edge of my skull with the knowledge that it once stored, but Dallon knows basically everything, and he was the one who sat the record player on a table and ordered it to play this song, so he should be able to identify this lovely melody.

“What’s this music?”

Dallon, who had been gazing off into the distance and out the window to the front lawn that’s tiny from our position, now engages me, offering a devious swatch in his blue jay irises. “Would you like to waltz with me, Brendon Urie?”

“I don’t know how.”

Someone, through all of those dance classes my mother forced me into with the faith that I would become a suitable husband who can just scrape by at the wedding when the time comes, I have no idea how to waltz. I understand that it’s three quarter notes, not the usual four, and I understand that it’s widely popular, and I also understand that guys don’t often dance with each other, so modifications are in need of an upgrade.

“That’s okay. I’ll teach you.”

I don’t want my friend to watch me fail, but I also don’t want my friend to think I’m a sea urchin or something, so I reluctantly peel from Dallon’s side with my hand still encased in his for one part of the dancing stance to be already completed.

Dallon tugs me closer to him, as narrow as a sheet of window glass and the same child’s breath forming shapes upon it, and it is in this clutch that I can truly imbibe how warm he is, how furnaces of love bubble in his core, how they burst through his undershirt and through his button down and through my hands placed delicately upon his shoulder as the woman of this elegant dance, through my own core as well.

Dallon shifts a bit in this position, subtlety correcting it so as to evade implying that I am terrible at dancing. “Just follow me, okay?” He waits for my nod of consent before stepping his feet into gear across the hardwood surface of his living room floor.

I’m too lost in this rhythm to take thorough notes of what’s happening, because I’m already so fluid in the home of Dallon’s familiar embrace that I’ve snagged the technique of this waltz, no matter how complex it may seem to others or how complex it actually is but covers my poor form in misconceptions. Both Dallon and the music I still cannot place are my guides, whispering movements into the soles of my feet and transmuting my bones into rubber flexible enough to dance perfectly with the love of my life, bending and breaking, healing and reshaping, loving and losing in every swipe of the body that’s first birthed and then abandoned for another that may not be better but is certainly greener, my bones snapping to part themselves for decadence, my heart raging with a passion for the dance of a lover, my body a feather passing through every medium bolted in my path, my smile tipped to the sky of Dallon’s eyes as if a cup in search of entirety, an entirety that can be gained from the surplus in Dallon’s soul, an entirety that nevertheless cannot bear to steal so brashly from him, even if he wholeheartedly allows it, for he is marvelous and pliable and meshing into my own body here and now in the captivity of a rocking waltz set to music elusive to my ears, and he is an adoration webbed in corporeal bonds and webbed in the bonds of my hands partaking in a dance with him that elucidates how extraordinary of a person he is, if he’s even a person at all, if he can sink to such a mortal standard when he is evidently coasting upon the clouds, upon the line where I cannot love, carved adeptly with a smirk because he braved it higher and is willing to teach me how to do the same, how to raise the bar so that he can climb it more and show off his skills in both reaching his goals of infatuation and in casting a heavenly light upon me so that I may properly glimpse his magic, and glimpse his magic I do, all the way from my lips to his.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: that last paragraph was only two sentences (almost 400 words) lmao I'm a devil
> 
> aesthetic: my skin after using a spinbrush on it (but omg it's so heavenly I'm crying)
> 
> ~Dacosmetics


	19. leave now, white devil

Since our comforting waltz that progressed for much longer than I would’ve thought a waltz could progress, partially because the music is a fucking symphony and we love being in each other’s arms, we’ve quieted ourselves back into the chair together, where we started with my fresh autumn sweater and Dallon’s body strained from a morning of horseback riding in the November wind’s teeth that have scraped my cheeks countless times before but have been healed by the gentle slipping of Dallon’s slender fingers at my skin.

And everything is perfect in this position, where I am no longer contemplating why the hell it was that my companion settled on suicide as an alternate approach when I could’ve guided him through his problems, no matter how abundant they may be, where I am no longer worried about what Dallon’s parents think of me with their harsh and conservative beliefs that don’t mean a fucking thing in a changing world of free speech bent towards liberating those who have suffered in the dark, where I can purchase peppermint to store in my lungs and then decadently release it three seconds afterwards, just to repeat the cycle again and again until it’s a rhythm as robotic as my electrified heartbeat clanging against my rib cage and against Dallon’s side while I’m snuggled into him, doing nothing and saying nothing, only enjoying the sounds of each other’s breathing and the fluttering of our chests and the clamoring of our bones, everything natural yet obscene to mechanistic minds.

I could spend all of eternity in this pose, because that means that I could never leave Dallon and Dallon could never leave me like he did before, but a greener idea plants itself in my train of thought until that train collapses with its only request being to fulfill that idea’s purpose in my head.

Now, Dallon is a beautiful boy, more so than anyone I’ve seen, but was he always this beautiful? I have no doubts that he was, but I nevertheless yearn to see who he was as a child, before society corrupted him, before he corrupted himself, before he ended up corrupting others with both his presence and his absence, confusing them as well, because those are supposed to be contradictions but were chiefly available in his existence.

No one can adequately describe a human’s appearance with enough detail to match them exactly, and I want the specifics out of this activity, because every ounce of Dallon’s grace is another thing I can attribute to him while catching upon my tongue the snowflakes struck from his lashes. Old family photos are the perfect option for my goals, and his parents seem the type to hoard entire albums stocked with pictures from every occasion, from each birthday who is strikingly different than the previous, from the random bar mitzvah thrown in there because Dallon is in the frame and his friends must’ve been dear to him, from family portraits clicked by a photographer desperate for money in a world in which his talents are battered with sticks on the same street he dwells at night with no other place to go, every despondent soul tucked away neatly behind the camera so that no one would’ve suspected that this is not a glamorous life but it is the only life they were endowed and endowed unwillingly, sprawling from the womb with kicks and wails accumulating in their muscles of a fledgling but muscles connected to a fighting personality, and I understand that this figure was once Dallon, is _still_ Dallon but with more of a refined posture so that he doesn’t drop even minor hints about the fact that he is wrestling with things he cannot physically see, with things he cannot conquer, with things that conquer _him_ , and every secret and every lie and every dulled face behind facades as wrinkled as parchment stains the ink of a photograph.

I need to know how Dallon was before he threw down the drawbridge and admitted that he has never been okay. I need to help for once, in a time where Dallon will allow me to do so. I need to be aware of the strife littered across his timeline with the promise that it will always be back for more, because it is hungry, and it is stubborn, and it is part of him, folded in the crisp sheet of a picture, and it is my job as his friend to know.

“Dallon, what did you look like as a kid?”

Instantaneously he tenses up, scattering the rhythm of his heartbeat, of his breathing, of his muscles, and it’s evident that they will never fall back in line with what he previously maintained, now only slickened by fear with no hope of escape from a firing pattern.

The question would seem innocuous to most, even if there are darker intentions packed underneath, because they wouldn’t be cognizant of those darker intentions and would permit me to peruse the aisles of their childhood, but Dallon is one of the most perceptive people I’ve ever met, with a dash of extreme wariness dumped into the mixture, so he knows exactly what I’m trying to do, and he detests it.

Nevertheless, he rises to procure one of the millions of scrapbooks he must possess in his very expansive estate, bones creaking and chattering to one another that the rebellion has begun, limbs stretching for the hardwood panels of the floor as if lead were guiding them, fragments of his spine crawling up his back to form a slight hunch, every aspect of physical deterioration manifesting right before my view, all from the simple question of what he looked like as a child.

From this, I consider reneging on my request to see, because Dallon may be fine after all, the suicide attempt having cleansed his system of depression and of those fucking placebo pills that were never healthy for him but more of an addiction than I ever was to that man, but he has already located a scrapbook, this one pink and crumbling both in the makeup of the book and in the pictures somersaulting from the edges, which somehow haven’t cascaded to the ground yet, with Dallon’s masterful hands to guide them, masterful hands that have coasted over me in a reassurance that was falsified to mask the fact that he was fucking dying, and he’s fucking dying in all of these pictures, isn’t he? That’s why he’s afraid, isn’t it?

Dallon arrives at the chair again, tumbling carelessly into it as I struggle to adjust myself before I get pommeled by his body turned rock hard by fear, and he flings the cover of the scrapbook open to reveal a standard greeting message of “The Weekes Family: Dallon”, so vague and yet so haunting, a title that would seem innocent but is linked to the family that destroyed Dallon’s mental stability through rigorous conditioning and repetitive rituals and hollow neglect, and every blow to his security is documented in this very scrapbook.

Dallon reluctantly flips the page to the first set of photos, where he is but a newborn incapable of reasoning, incapable of knowing anything besides the hand that feeds him and the sight around him, but even those things are blurry, and he’s remarkably mature for someone of that age. I don’t particularly like babies, but he just looks so calm, and it’s obvious that this mellow nature has chased him into young adulthood.

The next page is his progression as an infant to the toddler years, where some of his features are strikingly recognizable in the man I’m poking into this very moment, like his blue jay eyes, for example. Admittedly, I’m a bit jealous that others were able to observe those beautiful blue eyes before I was, but at least I have them now.

I watch as he grows up in between pages, memories strewn about the plastic slips to protect them like he couldn’t protect his memories of me, millions of things that he’s done, millions of things that he’s seen, millions of things that he’s been but isn’t anymore, millions of things sweeping in like a wave and retreating back into the ocean again after delivering its damage, after wiping away the markings in the sand.

Toy trucks fade to more complex building blocks. Crew cuts fade to the boyish mess Dallon is sporting this very moment. Overalls fade to t-shirts and skinny jeans. Happiness fades to depression. Then everything disappears.

Something’s off about this, how the pictures of him cease once he reaches early adolescence, instead focusing on things he’s made or things he’s done instead of things he is, and of course Dallon will never elucidate why that is, so I’m forced to do it myself. “Why are there no photos of you past age thirteen?”

Without missing a beat to think about the question, Dallon replies, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But—”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it, okay?” he snaps, and I slump into the chair to forget that instance like he forgot his childhood so many years ago.

~~~~~

**A/N: idek what to say honestly**

**aesthetic: this kid at the guitar performance switching to a different instrument for each song**

**~Dakotapillar**


	20. just your basic white girls

There’s perhaps nothing more soothing than relaxing outside with the person you love the very most as the November slew of leaf accompanied wind pinches your cheeks inside of the gazebo planted in the middle of your best friend’s expansive lawn in the suburbs of Bordeaux, France, all the way in another country that you haven’t explored before now and still choose to be curled up in the arms of someone you love so much that your life is hell without them, and I was forced to endure that until my strife ceased a few days ago when the love of my life returned to me in a different form than before but a different form that was lovely to see nevertheless, so in my decision to recline in my lover’s gazebo, I seek refuge in the embrace of that very man who came back into my life inadvertently but stayed wholeheartedly.

I will never forget what we both sacrificed to achieve this state of complete and utter repose in a location just as prosperous as our love who fought endlessly to pursue what was morally correct in our delusional minds, and that is why to another person this excursion would be nothing more than terrible coffee in a gazebo, but that is also why I cherish it with every inch of my being.

We have lost so much, and yet it does not quench. It will never quench. People will always demand more, will always punish us for being late to deliver, will always throw us the scraps of things we created on our own after they’ve pillaged our artistry for the marrow from them with the intention that we’ll later choke on the bone once they’ve been returned in shambles, and that’s not fucking good enough.

I have been conditioned to believe that I should be thankful for things as meager as regurgitated colors that used to be beautiful before their transmutation into a monster, but I’m not settling for that. I’ve been through too much to remain ignorant about what I do and do not deserve, about what is blurred and what is clear but simply hidden from me. I survived those ordeals, yes, but barely, and surviving isn’t so fun anymore, isn’t the sole purpose of existence.

I think I have finally found it after years of wondering when anything I do could become famous, could become worthwhile, could become a subject of praise among parents who are secretly rivaling with the others of their kind who live vicariously through their children and their children’s accomplishments. The truth is, quite frankly, that nothing we ever do will matter, so we might as well just do whatever the fuck it is that we please, and what I please is to be tucked in Dallon’s arms as I am currently, lubricating my throat with bitter coffee and laughing melodies.

Dallon, who always complains about how American food is absolutely abhorrent (which I somewhat agree with), is the one serving us coffee most likely ground from nuts buried in the harsh dirt of a winter wonderland, nuts who weren’t washed afterwards, nuts who were infested with maggots all throughout their life cycle, those nuts. Deez nuts, as Kara would always shout ironically around the house when that was the fad among the straight white boys at her school. At least Dallon made it himself and didn’t walk ostensibly two steps to the Starbucks at the corner of every fucking street in the world just to get overpriced bean water that he could’ve brewed himself, however atrociously, judging from what he’s created this morning, but I appreciate his effort and his willingness to stand strong in the temptations of the basic white girls, even if they’re extremely difficult to ignore when they’re snapping unwanted selfies in your direction and screaming about how many useless likes they received on Instagram, likes that won’t mean a single thing in their future after high school, but white girls can be fucking scary as hell, so it was in Dallon’s best interest to stay away from any location where Starbucks is distributed.

But now I’m stuck with this ghastly brew (may I remind you of the frozen, dirty nut under the winter ground analogy?), but at least I’m drinking it with Dallon in a home I’ve never seen before this week, and there are so many things to absorb, such as the birds flapping along in the harsh chill of November, wrens and blue jays pairing together to converse just as Dallon and I do, the subtle dancing of the trees and their ruffled leaves with the movement, grass mantled by the daily presence of sticky dew and our fresh presence located in the center of the magnificence in the nature surrounding us.

And with this serenity from nature, it makes life seem as though there’s nothing to worry about, has never been anything to worry about, will never be anything to worry about, but that’s not true, though I’m not wholly aware of that, so I’m pondering questions I shouldn’t be, and even worse, I’m going to fucking utter them, too.

Ever since yesterday, when we procured Dallon’s scrapbook filled with pictures of his dark and dreary childhood and Dallon became silent at my rude inquiry, I’ve been thinking about the answer to it and why Dallon was repelled by its seemingly harmless connotations. If it’s true that there are no pictures of him past age thirteen, then that’s a grand topic that won’t be ignored by the people who peruse the scrapbooks, so shouldn’t he expect those questions about it?

Yes, I suppose even if something is in plain sight I shouldn’t disturb it, because quite frankly other people know more about it than I do, so that’s more of their possession than mine, but Dallon accepted to the terms, however mundane they were, and I just really want to know, because there are most likely underlying issues in the plastic slips of the pages along with the pictures.

So I prepare myself to dive into secrets that I probably should have left alone but didn’t because I’m fucking stupid with the same impulsivity that landed us in this elusive situation, and part of me shrinks at the thought of what I’m doing, because Dallon looks so peaceful, coffee lightly tapping his fingers as he gazes through the blank space of the gazebo, but it must be done. Part of a relationship is trusting one another, even if that trust is fabricated out of broaching an uncomfortable subject, but we have been starving for trust since the genesis of this love, so it’s time to rebuild it now, and I unlock my vocal cords to do so.

Before I can speak, however, Dallon, still focused outside of the gazebo, says, “Brendon, do you want to know why there aren’t any pictures of me past age thirteen?”

He beat me before I could ask, but it’s the same destination at least, just without my impolite accusations shoved upon someone who is too pure to deserve them. Actually, I’m glad that Dallon was the one to bring this up, because then I wouldn’t have to deal with the guilt of prying into his life when he’s prying into it himself now, though I shouldn’t be so selfish for knowledge, as this same sensation has caused many conflicts in history, but everyone was as foolish as before, so are we even affected? I don’t give a shit anymore, not after losing the love of my life whom I don’t plan on losing again, and if I can ensure that by asking him absurd questions about why he became a ghost at the beginning of puberty, then I without a doubt will.

“Yes, Dallon, I would love to know,” I reply, a bit too harshly for the innocuous intentions that I display to the world to null their suspiciousness, but sometimes my veneer chips, and sometimes I ache to comprehend things that are incomprehensible, and sometimes I’m angry enough for its crimson fibres to slither up my throat and out of my mouth, and I can’t really control who is there for the collateral damage, though I’m sorry that it’s Dallon.

My companion inches a swallow down his neck before proceeding, though he takes his time to instill premonition into the previously jocular mood of the gazebo. “When I was thirteen years old, I acknowledged that death is coming for us all, and when you’re that age, your parents don’t really want you to know nihilistic shit like that, but that’s what I could grasp, perhaps too much so, and I basically wanted death to come for me faster, so I faded out of things that could remember me to make it seem as though I was already dead.”

Both of us are silent for a while, the rhythm being that I’m too shocked to speak, and Dallon’s anticipating my response, which I somehow provide him with seven seconds later. “So was it a trick, or did you _want_ to die at age thirteen?”

A sigh traipses through Dallon’s lungs, a hand at the bridge of his nose. “Brendon, don’t get wrapped up in things that don’t concern you.”

“But I’m your friend!” I protest.

“Yes, but even friends don’t know it all.”

~~~~~

**A/N: ugh when will this story be over honestly**

**aesthetic: not writing this story**

**~Dacrumbling**


	21. see u in hell :')

Our morning was quite chaotic to say the least, primarily when we had intended for it to be a wonderful vacation from stress and Dallon’s parents and everything plaguing us to simply enjoy some coffee, bitter and distasteful yet brewed by the love of my life, so it’s my duty to adore it just as much as I adore him, without any complaints about it, as that’s how love distorts the mind, both for the better and for the worse.

On one hand, I’m glad that Dallon shared with me a secret that he hasn’t shared with anyone before, but on the other hand, I don’t want him to feel pressured about what transpired in the creaking gazebo, pressured into spilling more details about the hell he’s endured since he understood what hell is, how ghastly it is, how it warps even the greatest of minds into its shrieking flames, and then we great minds rant about how nobody ever understands our struggles, our pain, our blood on the battlefields so familiar to us, and then we have the audacity to ask ourselves why we suffer in silence. Why must we bring shame to the unacknowledged party of humanity? If we are endeavoring to broadcast our strife, then we should therefore refrain from also broadcasting our hatred for those who have at least a _chance_ of aiding us. Step upon creaking ladders and take risks, but do not unveil our ego and our melancholy so that the world may laugh at us, so that the world may neglect us like hell does, but the world should not be hell when it is held in its original context, a context that has strayed so far from the ideal that it is no longer recognizable. The world should be as beautiful as Dallon is, but Dallon has to constantly maintain that beauty so the world doesn’t fucking steal it from him as it stole the beauty and the lives of many others before him and _will_ steal the beauty and the lives of many others after him without pausing to contemplate the gravity of what it’s doing, and my lover is being dragged under just like alternate times in the flames.

But we’ve been saved from the hell, from the underworld that we accidentally created when we thought it was safe and secure and just fun and games, and now life is a much happier experience than it was months ago when we were lost even in each other’s company, for we are in each other’s company currently, but we are not also in despair, rather in the warm embrace of each other’s arms as we watch the _Dead Poets Society_ , my favorite movie of all time that Dallon somehow hasn’t seen yet, but he was terribly excited to watch it, so I figured we would both derive pleasure from it, in the cuddling position of our bodies and in the speculation in our minds brought forth by the film.

Dallon was chattering all throughout the day that he wanted us to do something together, something that I love but also something that he knows nothing about but intends to find out and love it as much as I do, and I conjectured that the _Dead Poets Society_ is the perfect match for Dallon’s goals, and from what I can tell by the fascinated glow of ebony of his pupils and the various expressions scattered about his face, he’s already on the path to loving it as much as I do, and that’s just so fucking fantastic after every battle in which he was drafted and barely escaped.

He hasn’t talked to me throughout the movie, though I’m not disappointed about that, as he’s clearly enjoying the marvels flipping over the screen in bright colors and meaningful poetry and high school kids with a devotion to archaic rituals that they never deserted for the typical activities of their peers, such as partying and setting up ghastly pranks and getting high not on life but on the corporeal substances made ugly by their abuse enacted by stupid people with nothing better to do than kill themselves gradually, and Dallon may be able to resonate with that, but he’s too entranced by the movie to explain if he is, and I’m not judging him for that, because he is endowed a reprieve from the horrors of his parents and sometimes of me and of something as personal as his own mind, stimulated now my by favorite movie that is becoming _his_ favorite movie, and I’m grateful for that.

All is going well so far. We’re encountering each dip and turn of the emotions associated with the movie: the embarrassment when Knox gets rejected by Cris, the joy when Neil snags the lead role of the play, the fear when the squad’s plans are uncovered, and the total depression when Neil is found with the smoke of a gun seeping into his lifeless body.

Why am I so fucking stupid? I should have expected the inevitable end of the movie where Neil fucking shoots himself because of the same abusive parents Dallon has, where his actions mirror Neil’s with a premature death that Dallon somehow fled from before it was too late for his tripping heart and lethargic pulse, wracked by sweat and his body’s perverse desire to live when Dallon overdosed wholly on purpose, and Neil wasn’t so lucky, so now Dallon and I inadvertently shoved him into this mess of past memories that he can’t even remember, where Neil is just like him, so full of hope and ambition for what he’s going to do with his life, hope and ambition that fell short at the thirst for self destruction that’s been accumulating since the dawn of time related to Dallon’s existence through the womb as he kicked at his mother who was only trying to protect him, as he now kicks at me through the covers in tears with the realization that what Todd is currently experiencing in this movie is what he forced _me_ to endure with his own foolish mistakes and without a consideration for how I would respond to it, and I responded with a storm that he could not see in the haze of remission, a remission that I was unaware of while I was fucking sobbing into my pillow and praying that Kara wouldn’t hear me because she never understood what it meant to lose the love of your life when you could’ve tried harder to save them, through all of their attempts to push you away and all of their acid trips in back alleyways to remain blocked from those they cherish and all of their faults that whispered for them to just fucking do it already, and do it they did, except Dallon was strong Neil wasn’t, and he’s suddenly not so strong anymore after witnessing what Neil’s death signified to his friends, what his apparent death signified to me.

Dallon pauses the movie solemnly, absolutely petrified of what the seemingly innocuous motion picture has just shown him, and his head slowly rotates to address me with tears skating down its cheeks in the shock and the melancholy of this scene. “Is...is that what I did to you?” He fraily points to the halted frame of Todd rolling down the hill sheeted by snow, slipping and sliding without a worry about where his feet land because it might as well be the underworld, as that’s where he can die just like his best friend did.

And yes, that _is_ what Dallon did to me, because for over a month I was rolling down the hills of my mind just as Todd is, except those hills hosted lava bursting from the cracks, pointed spikes on each blade of grass, were so slick that my acceleration drove me into trees equally as jagged as the hill was. Dallon could’ve stopped by my house if he remembered me even the slightest bit, because even if he did not feel welcome, I would welcome him, and if he didn’t remember me at all, then he could’ve at least attended school again to regain a sense of who he was academically and who his friends were and what school was like for him before he attempted the suicide that left us all asphyxiated under the paint we admired his use of.

Except how can you tell that to someone you don’t want to hurt? Maybe it was the old Dallon Weekes’ fault, but it’s not the new Dallon Weekes’ fault for sure. He did not know what his prior self was shoving the future self into, how it would wreck the lives of those around him, and even if Dallon does know what happened, he’s still thoroughly shaken up by the astonishment and the regret of it, and all of the sudden, I’m not the miserable one. It’s him.

“No, Dallon,” I assure him, resting my palm on his shivering arm and pretending not to notice how cold it is, how it cuddles an earthquake in its bones.

Dallon is disbelieving, out of breath, electrified, scared. “But I must’ve.”

“Just don’t worry about it.”

~~~~~

**A/N: I was looking forward to writing this chapter but now the only thing I'm looking forward to is finishing this book**

**aesthetic: that alarmed expression I make whenever the computer moderator walks by**

**~Dickota**


	22. suburban moms comin 4 ya neck

Everything should have been okay, but it is not, and now I am absolutely terrified out of my mind, because this was supposed to be a fantastic morning with the love of my life clutched in my arms after a night of the tumultuous movie called the _Dead Poets Society_ , which both of us thoroughly enjoyed besides the suicide of the plot, and after that scene passed over us like sheep in a restless child’s mind, we tasked ourselves with forgetting it to instead only remember how it feels to be clasped in each other’s embrace, but now Dallon’s mother is bursting through the door frantically and stumbling upon a sight that she knew she would find eventually, and it was all just a matter of time really, and Dallon and I both recognized this, yet we did absolutely nothing about it, and we should have been more careful.

We should have hidden our relationship from Dallon’s bigoted parents like millions of kids do every day, except they have more of a difficult time than we do, because some of them have to hide their identity from _everyone_ , whereas Dallon’s parents are the main culprit right now, but we’re still caught in the crossfire of their inconsolable homophobia, and we should have foreseen this chain of events unfolding in front of us in the current moment, in the sunlight dashing through the blinds to promise that today is a good day, but alas, that is a lie.

Dallon and I could have stowed away our relationship from his parents, but we didn’t, and now we’re being punished for it. We could have slept in separate beds, because there are two twin mattresses in his room for my use, and it’s just that mundane to do, but we ignored that to be rogue instead, and rogue we were, but we were foolish about it. We could have elected to remain in America, where it is still bigoted but also where we will receive the most amount of acceptance and none of the hatred from Dallon’s parents, and that would be all right for me, because I’m sure Kara would understand why we needed to stay in our home city, as she loves Dallon, and she loves me, and there are always other opportunities to travel to France, even opportunities with the person she wanted to go with the most. We could have only looked at each other as friends or professionals might, and though his parents may be suspicious of the authoritarian personalities we guard around each other, it would be better than being caught by people who could throw us out of the house or fucking disown the son whom they have raised since his birth by their own choice, not his, and since it was their choice, then it is their duty to protect him without complaints, without the molding age of something like cheese or other perishable items. And as much as I hate to say it, we could have never kissed in the first place, back in the main bathroom that reeked of cleaning products scrubbed violently against the alabaster tile as if it will never be clean as long as it is whole, because the world has a knack of claiming the perfect things to be immoral and sordid and not worthy of anyone’s time when, in fact, they are the most charming out of them all, and _Dallon_ is the most charming out of them all, yet we made a mistake by falling back in love when maybe that spirit never died anyway, but we can’t play with fire when the fuel of amnesia is heavily present in the closed quarters of our hearts, or else a conflagration will erupt in places we once held dear to us for being our only safe havens. I don’t want that, but that prospect is what is coming on this trail, because we failed. We fucking failed at keeping the only secret worth keeping, and now Dallon’s mother is at my neck scouring my eyes for an explanation as to how I could be so audacious by corrupting her son, a son whom she never even loved as she should have, and I have loved him more than she ever has, so how did _I_ corrupt him when her motherly care (or lack thereof) was the one that withdrew him from family pictures, the one that made him terrified of asking for help or guidance or the affection that she allotted the people around her, the one that sent him away in a lie to protect a mother’s ego? I am doing nothing wrong, but Dallon’s mom is tugging me out of the door as she slams it against her son so that he cannot witness the events preparing to take place, and as much as this pains me, I have to do it for Dallon. I’m not going back.

I can detect the kicking of Dallon’s feet against the wall, with his mother’s back turned towards them to muffle the sound as she locks him inside of the chamber that he thought was safe but isn’t so safe anymore, because he’s being imprisoned by someone who is supposed to love him unconditionally, though that person is now slandering the one whom _he_ loves unconditionally, but I can take it, and I’m taking it for him. He does not deserve this from his own mother, so I’m going to stick up for him until my last breath, whispering his name in the prints upon my lungs, all the way up my esophagus, passing through my cobalt lips stained by murder, all for him. I can fucking do it, and I can do it well.

“Brendon Urie, what do you think you’re doing?” Mrs. Weekes reprimands me in that thick accent of hers which I would like to say invalidates her statement, but that’s unfair, a case of ad hominem, and I don’t play that way. I can win this debate solely on my logic, not on her wide French accent, because to be quite honest, it is more intimidating than humorous, and I can see that Dallon’s accent is far kinder than hers, despite the harsh flicks of the _r_ sounds deep in his throat like a gizzard blending rocks or some shit.

I feel so tiny when this woman is scolding me, but I must remind myself that her bigoted opinions don’t mean shit to me in a progressive society where I will be accepted for who I am, so I square my shoulders, pounding her with my impenetrable eye contact, and reply, “Loving him like you never could.”

“Excuse me,” she shrieks, layering fingers the texture of a raisin (though thinner in width) over her atrocious floral blouse, far too dramatic for the scene, like something out of a movie. “Dallon is my _son_! You have no right to say that I do not love him.”

Typical parents of abuse, preaching that they love their child more than they love the world, because it was from their loins that they were sprouted without so much as a letter of consent, purely brought into existence by a desire for someone, almost like a fucking pet to carry on the family bloodline and the family name, both of which don’t matter when we’re all dead anyway, when those items are completely pointless in and of themselves, but those items are regarded highly by society, so it is with subtle deceit that Mrs. Weekes calls Dallon her son when he had no say in the heated discussion of passion in the bedroom seventeen years ago, and now all of this shit has occurred as a result of it, and does his mother understand whose fault that is? It’s not mine, and it’s not Dallon’s, and it’s not Kara’s. It’s the fault of Mrs. Weekes, as she couldn’t care for her son like a mother is supposed to, with the no strings attached policy, with the words of encouragement even when he messed up, with the tender treatment of a child as fragile as the blue jays nesting in Dallon’s beautiful indigo eyes. Dallon was benefited by none of those, and it is time that I elucidate this fact to the very mother who stripped him of his rights as a child inadvertently sprung into this world.

“Then I assume that you also love things that _he_ loves, yes?” My brow is harnessed to the brutal mountains of my forehead, and reluctantly, Dallon’s mother nods, so I proceed with my case. “Well Dallon loves _me_.”

I note that Dallon is silent now, perhaps exhausted by kicking at the door for a few minutes only for his mother to press her back flatter against the partition solely to keep him contained, keep his ideas contained, keep his homoeroticism contained as if it’s a beast, though that could not be more of a false accusation. Dallon has always been observant, and I realize that he’s searching for the perfect time to strike his mother to either fly free of his aperture bonds or come out of the closet completely, and these doors may be the doors _to_ that closet, doors that he will soon be destroying with a splattering of wood chips and paint and the same metal digging into his skin that killed people in wars, except this is a war against his own mind, and he is finally breaking away from it, laying down his weapons, living the life he wants to live, not the life his parents want him to live, not the life his sister wants him to live, not even the life _I_ want him to live, even if my standards are relatively low and are only the doctrine that he should fucking stay alive like he almost failed to do a month ago, and this is where his new life begins, bursting through the door to accost his mother as I handle the situation while he’s preparing himself to do so.

“That’s impossible,” Mrs. Weekes negates, flustered by the mere idea of her son not conforming to the strict guidelines she imposed without his permission. “My son isn’t a filthy homosexual. You might be, but he definitely is not.”

And here we are with that blatant homophobia again. It’s a new age! No one gives a single shit if you’re homosexual or heterosexual in lots of parts of the country, even in this unfamiliar one called France. In fact, France is supposedly the friendliest country to the LGBT+ community in the world, yet Dallon’s mother _still_ is against them, but why? It’s probably better that we don’t have Dallon portray an annoying straight boy who harasses women on the street all throughout his miserable life, and Mrs. Weekes seems pretty protective of Elle and Elle’s friends, so isn’t that a fruitful concept for her son to be gay? I was so close to saving Dallon because he was my boyfriend, so that has to amount to something, not just yet another gag of homophobia laced around my teeth, and Dallon sees this, too.

“Guess what, _Maman_!” Dallon screams through the muffler of the door, and his mother jumps back in alarm. “I’m pretty fucking gay!”

And all she does is gasp, but Dallon and I both know that she has freed him.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: SLAY BINCH SLAY
> 
> aesthetic: beanies omg fight me
> 
> ~Dakoreo


	23. my kink is communication

Throughout all of this fucking chaos that’s been zipping past me like a bullet on the muddy terrain of mental war, I have neglected how much I miss the short man whom I call Kenny or Kenneth Harris when I need to snare his attention, because it’s always been at the back of my mind as I reserved the front for the duty of managing the shit that has flipped my life upside down for the second or third time since I turned seventeen, which is a lot to transpire in a year or rather half a year with my birthday being in May and it being the crisp month of November currently, but I haven’t seen Kenny since the beginning of it, and he’s so kind and so genuine and so thoughtful about everything that I need when he doesn’t have much for himself, in addition to perfect ears to hear all of the wild stories I’ve amassed over my visit, a visit that hasn’t been that long but is still packed with conflict and the raging homosexuality of teenage aesthetes merely trying to survive in the occasional underworld that is Bordeaux, France, whose tragedies I have glimpsed many times before in my treacherous and lonesome childhood.

Part of me is remorseful that Kenny wasn’t able to visit France with us, but I am also aware that my parents wouldn’t be so well disposed towards someone who has basically stepped up to fill the job that they signed a contract to fill but never did, and he was completely fine about staying in Las Vegas from what I could tell, though I’m such a guilty soul who needs to recompense him with something, and what’s better than a video chat among me, Brendon, and Kenny? Kara and Elle can even greet him if they want to do so, and we can grant him a snippet of what life has been like here in Bordeaux, however similar to a funeral it is.

I suggested this idea to Brendon, who is still a bit shaken up by his altercation with my mother, though I’m not angry with him about it, because he did what I have always wished to do but never could, and I’ve allowed him time to recovery, but I’m absolutely ecstatic about video chatting with Kenny, and Brendon has noticed, so whatever protest he had earlier put up about moving his limbs or doing something fairly mundane is now annulled, for he cares about me and my excitement, and I’m pretty sure he likes Kenny just as much as I do, just from the one occasion where they’ve met before we shipped ourselves off to France for a week of total destruction.

So with that, we prepare to video chat him, having memorized his work schedule and the time zone differences and figuring out that he is at home right now, most likely cooking his famous (more like infamous) bowl of macaroni and cheese, which I now yearn for, a change from the far too elegant dining we’ve been experiencing in Bordeaux which has been arranged solely to impress Brendon, though I can assume that their efforts will soon deteriorate after what transpired between my mother and _mon petit ami_ today.

I procure my computer from my bag cloaked in the corner of my room where the sunlight bounces last to find that a thin sheet of dust has wrapped its particles around the machine. I haven’t utilized my laptop since we arrived in France, because I was so caught up with trying to hide my everlasting secrets from my parents and with falling back in love with someone whom I may have never stopped loving, so that pandemonium has granted that dust access to lie atop my computer as if it owns the device, so I brush it off for being so impertinent and for its use of video calling Kenny to indirectly see him for the first time in a week, and that week has certainly been stuffed with interesting things to spill all over this guy, our mouths sprinting a mile a minute yet never slowing because Kenny never asks us to, with that sharp mind of his, the sharp mind that I am missing extensively, the sharp mind that I need to call.

Brendon scampers over to me, huddled close to my side as I carefully position the laptop on the nightstand in between the two twin beds so that Kenny can see us both, a clear path to the door paved in case Kara or Elle join our party, though I’m not sure Elle will know who he is, but there’s always time for first impressions, and I think Kenny and Elle will hit it off very quickly if they ever do meet.

Both of them are kind spirits, and they’re kind of shy, too, which will only be a barrier when they first meet, but after they break that wall with a synergic sledgehammer, they’ll be the best of friends. Maybe I shouldn’t trying to be setting up my guardian with my sister, especially since the two are so close to me, Elle having been a salient figure in my childhood and Kenny having been the person who rescued me from the back alley when I was attempting to fucking kill myself with pills that wouldn’t even work anyway, but because they are such important people in my life, I wish the best for them, and maybe the _happiness_ from meeting each other will be the best for them.

However, I’m not going to pressure my sister into coming into the room with no recollection of why she’s here, and with her perceptive abilities, she will quickly find out and shout at me, though she’d only shout at me after the call has ended, because she’s nice enough to spare the recipient of the video chat from her sibling anger, and she’s the kind of person that Kenny needs, as they’re so much alike, but I’m not going to force her into the room, for she’d be opposed to the idea of dating Kenny once I attempted to plan this. She’ll probably just walk in out of her own volition once she hears the giggles and the tumbling of furniture when we get out of control and the strange voice of a new person, so she can meet Kenny at that point. In the meantime, Brendon and I are readying ourselves to speak with the man I’ve missed since we arrived in Bordeaux, and what a treat that is.

Brendon is laboring to locate the app in which we can chat with Kenny, though the only thing he’s currently locating is failure, so I snag the laptop from him and click the app in the middle of the screen, the app that he should’ve spotted at first sight, and he mouths a quick _o_ of realization to replace a facepalm, but I only laugh at how adorable he is.

Scrolling through the list of contacts, I am unable to find Kenny’s number, but luckily I’ve memorized it like I memorize very unuseful things, though this time it’s handy to have with me, so I type in the number, quickly creating a brief contact profile for him, and press the call button.

The computer screen flashes with our own reflections as we anticipate Kenny’s approval of the call, and I can see Brendon shrink back from beside me, abhorring how he looks in the camera, though I’m sure he’s aware that there’s always that small rectangle in the corner where he can see himself, but he’ll most likely just stay away from that with all of his energy, however dehydrated it is from the excursion with my ghastly mother.

The label below Kenny’s contact name, which I set as “the mac and cheese dictator”, switches from calling to connecting, and this is when excitement bubbles inside of my stomach, and I can detect Brendon’s elation passing through his body and spritzing the surrounding furniture as if an air freshener. The screen crackles with pixels flying everywhere possible for a moment, switching between a black sheet and my vibrant bedroom, before it clears to reveal the man I haven’t spoken to in a week.

“Oh, hey, Dallon!” Kenny exclaims, looking, in the subtlest of manners, less stressed than when I left him in Las Vegas, and I can infer why. Taking care of only one person is a hassle, but when you get dumped with two, that’s a lot of gravity added to the situation, and though Kenny has professed countless times that I’m no trouble, there’s bound to be more stress with two people rather than one, even if that stress is abundant no matter what.

“Hey, Kenny!” Brendon replies, scooting farther into the frame to remind Kenny that he is also with me, though that seems so unlike him, as he was hiding from his own reflection only moments earlier. “Dallon’s mother hates me because she thinks I made her son gay.” Brendon is being extremely blunt and disparate from his normal personality of quietness, but I suppose he’s diving straight (well, not straight) into the point that would’ve arisen anyway, as it’s simply too juicy of a story to pass up, but in such an insensitive fashion, this story has become somewhat embarrassing, though Kenny is already cracking up behind the camera, snickering into the table mat by his designated seat at the kitchen table.

“I hope you can survive a vacation with someone like that,” Kenny says through his uncontrollable laughing fit, and I realize that it’s all fun and games, but I want to tell him that I didn’t just have to survive a vacation with my homophobic mother; I had to survive my entire childhood with her, and once I finally escaped from that, I was as ecstatic as one could be, but I’m back now at Kara’s request, and all should’ve been fine, but now my mother is hounding both me and _mon petit ami_ , and that’s where it stops. She doesn’t own me, not anymore, and I love Brendon Urie enough to show her that her bigoted efforts had no effect on me once I fled from Bordeaux and immigrated to America, and they will have no effects on me now. I have new friends, new ambitions, new faith in who I am, and she isn’t about to rob me of that. So long, mother, and I pray that you’ll enjoy this progressive world in which you are nothing.

“Eh, I think we’re doing fine,” I negate, warmed by the hint of a smile peeking out of the edge of my taffy lips, because I know something that the others don’t, that my _mother_ doesn’t, and that’s the concept that I am finally free from the chains with which my family has bound me to a life of imprisonment that is no longer present.

“As long as you’re staying safe, you can do whatever the hell you want.” Realizing abruptly how this might be interpreted, Kenny adds, “Within reason, of course.”

Brendon and I are gentle spirits who abstain from impulsivity whenever it is possible, so we would probably just engage in secure activities and reduce the risk of being unsafe like Kenny doesn’t want us to be, and that would be completely okay with us. People who are centered towards different activities from their peers don’t feel guilty about that, because they are centered around them because they enjoy them, not because they are a manufactured hipster or something equally as shitty and artificial.

Having settled that, I change the subject. “So what have you been doing while I’ve been gone? Have you kept on eating that same macaroni and cheese meal that you always cook?”

Kenny looks only partially offended by my somewhat slanderous comment, but that’s just his countenance at work, which means that he could be infuriated, although being infuriated also isn’t his nature, but there’s anyway some sort of pique. “Do you think my life revolves around you?” He’s laughing, but I suppose I shouldn’t have been so rude. He’s brushing it off, however, and he’s as pardoning as always. “I’ve been doing well, and yes, I have been eating the same mac and cheese meal that I always cook.”

It’s not like I can really blame him for eating mac and cheese constantly when he’s stressed out of his mind, because as I said before, stress is only on a partial decline when you’ve removed someone from your life, and it’s even less of a decline when you know that the person will be back soon and you’ll need to take care of them, so he needs a quick and easy meal to sustain himself while he frets about finances and all of that shit plaguing adulthood, and he’s still healthy anyway when you look past the dark circles frequently wallowing in the area below his eyes and the occasional lag in his step, and he’s keeping himself joyous somehow in the face of a crisis, so whatever works for him, I guess.

“How’s the stress?” I ask, describing the whole tangent on which I have recently embarked, even if it began with his constant flow of mac and cheese.

Kenny rubs underneath his eyes as if some purple will smudge off onto his fingers, checking out of an odd whim to see if it was functional, though that is not the case. “Yeah, it’s gotten better without you around, but don’t blame yourself, Dallon.”

Sometimes in the subtlest of ways, Kenny can be a fucking saint. I often _do_ blame myself for stressing Kenny out more than he is already stressed, and he is aware of that, so he tells me not to worry about it, even if it’s true. What did I do to deserve him? What did I do to deserve any of this? I attempted suicide and received this bounty with only a fragment of the melancholy I forced my friends into, and Kenny is so willing to treat me to splendor when I should not have any at all, because I snatched it from the people who cared about me just so I could fucking kill myself and be awarded with the knowledge that my friends were suffering at the hands of my gloomy legacy, and now _I’m_ fucking stressed to shit in a video call that was supposed to alleviate this stress but is only reminding me about mistakes that I can’t even remember, but perhaps this video chat was a mistake, and perhaps Kenny hates being in it, too, and perhaps this is just my paranoia, but Brendon is silent with a loss for words, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s because of me, if all of this is because of me.

But I deserve to suffer through the end of this video call, because I made other people suffer at my terrible mistakes, and I can’t be the petulant child that I always am, so I smile and wave like a good kid and require myself to repent for the destruction caused by my actions. It’s the least I can do.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I kept expanding this chapter so I wouldn't have to write as much for the other ones lmao I'm so lazy
> 
> aesthetic: hipster glasses like the one patrick has
> 
> ~Dakrunk


	24. I am a hoe!

Dallon and I have been through so many ups and downs in such a short time, and I’m not sure if I would ever erase them from my memory if I received the chance, as every event in a human’s life is connected to other events, and all of those events teach unforgettable lessons, and though I have no idea what lessons my events have taught me, I at least know that they affected me in an indescribable way, and just because I cannot identify them doesn’t mean that I have not been warped by their power.

And though there were probably more pitfalls than there were prosperous outcomes in this trip to France, I’d actually enjoy staying here to experience some more, but that unfortunately is not on the table, as we’re leaving Dallon’s estate today to return to the desert of Las Vegas, Nevada, which is perfectly fine as well, because I would rather not be hounded by Dallon’s homophobic parents who think that I cursed their son when it was Dallon that cursed me to a month of suffering and has finally lifted me from that abyss to be _mon petit ami_ , and even if that _is_ homosexual corruption, it’s not like Mr. and Mrs. Weekes’ opinions matter in this world.

We’re journeying back home to where we started, where _all_ of this started, where our relationship went to hell and then rebuilt itself, where I cried for days at the loss of something I already knew was unstable, where that unstable concept returned to me and wiped away those concerns of safety, where we visit permanently as a whole deity in our own right, where we desert the homophobic parents who would’ve deserted us if they snared the chance, where everything will be all right again, where we can fall into a pattern of loving each other and losing each other in only brief seconds and ultimately realizing that losing each other might not be as brief as some other times, but that’s part of a relationship, and we’ve worked so relentlessly to earn a relationship, and we didn’t work to earn a free pass out of the underworld of it, but that’s a long while down the road, and the only underworld we’re faced with right now is the few minutes that we remain to be in the clutches of Dallon’s parents.

Elle is as good natured as she always is, and part of me wishes that I could’ve interacted with her more, as she seems like quite the altruistic person who would care about everyone despite their many flaws, and it’s always useful to have the sibling of your boyfriend on your side to spill some childhood secrets that you can utilize for blackmail in the event that they eat your designated cereal. On the plus side, I can be securely in Las Vegas and just ask Dallon to allow us to video chat with Elle, and we can say whatever we want without the wrath of his parents being a haunting threat hanging over us.

Those same parents are the ones who are glaring at me as subtly as they can, and Dallon doesn’t even have to look at them to know that it’s exactly what they’re doing and exactly what they will be doing for the rest of this meeting, and after that we’ll be flying towards the place where we actually feel home, so I can play with them without consequences, for I’m sure Dallon will never be returning to this underworld ever again after all of the shit he forgot was so ever present in his current life and in his past, and I am so proud of him for removing these toxic people from his mindset, because although they are his parents right now and have been his parents since he was born and will be his parents until they die, he is not obligated to provide them with the affection that he’s poured into our relationship instead of theirs, because they didn’t do shit for him besides scar him psychologically. They accused _me_ of luring him into a suicide attempt when he wouldn’t have been so shaky if his parents were the kinds of parents they should be.

Mr. and Mrs. Weekes don’t shake my hand when we are discussing the plans for our departure, and I can detect the faintest dash of joy at this, but do they also know that I’m dragging their homosexually corrupted son along with me? They probably do, and I suppose that’s why they’re endeavoring to hug their cursed child, which that cursed child blatantly deflects to instead stand by my side, and it’s obvious that his parents are devastated and are turning bitter, but neither of us really give a shit about them, as our minds are at the airport and what will occur when we arrive at our house in Las Vegas, where we will be safe from _mon petit ami_ ’s homophobic parents.

It’s evident that we will be met with the bullies in Nevada who accuse Dallon of faking it for attention yet somehow disappearing for a month, and we will also be very behind on our schoolwork, but this was an impulsively planned trip, and artists such as Dallon love impulsivity, in addition to the fact that we rekindled an old flame and defeated the barriers that would motivate Dallon to visit his homophobic parents again, and not one part of me feels guilty for turning him against his own family, because they were turned against _him_ long ago, and there’s nothing shameful about fleeing from that hell, especially when the airplane to liberation is so close to us.

It is my faith that this ride on the airplane back to Las Vegas will not be as harrowing as it was last time, even if I eventually settled into soothing a rhythm of counting the locations and how many seconds it took to fly past them with five second intervals in between to reset the clock and pick another location to follow, but I’ll admit that this activity was a bit obsessive and a bit compulsive and completely unnecessary if I were a normal person who isn’t terrified of being so high in the air with so many risks of falling and dying, but I’m not a normal person, so the prospect for myself is only existent when I hope that I’ll be a tad better with my emotions than I was on the last flight. Dallon will be right next to me, which is always a help, and it is also my faith that he will be more responsive to my fear this time, as all he did on the last flight was clamp my leg to the chair so that I would stop rocking the seat with my somatically expelled nervousness, but now that I’m fueled by the energy of vanquishing two other bigots in this world, the only reason I would be jittering would be because of my excitement towards that goal, for in a place where we forgotten warriors suffer, freedom is a rarity and extraordinary when it comes, so I would just like to believe that Dallon and I have made it to that paradise.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: these parents oh my g o d
> 
> aesthetic: the air bud franchise
> 
> ~Dakotainted


	25. this is it I'm done

Everything is better now that we’ve broken free from the menacing grasp of the Weekes family. We barely even talk about my parents except to laugh at how absurd their doctrines are, how absurd _they_ are to try and influence me with them and their blatant fallacy that only a bigot could believe, but for the most part, they’re only the occasional manifestation of childhood cringe that paralyzes you before you scold yourself for bringing it up and frantically try to remove it from your train of thought. That’s all they are now, nothing more to us than a speck of regret.

We have improved every aspect of our relationship to the point where we would do anything to protect each other, a promise that has materialized on several occasions when the horrid Spencer Smith has decided that a suicide attempt isn’t enough of a hell for me and also decided that I was in need of more bullying, which Brendon saved me from, and then I saved _Brendon_ when Spencer turned around to go after his opinions with a hammer of a fist to the nose, and after all of this turmoil we fixed each other up so that we could be the entirety that we have worked so hard to be, through every whisper of the underworld rising from the earth and scalding our feet and our stability that we now possess, and because of that stability, we are doing as well as we can.

We are doing _so_ well that we have journeyed into the street to promenade across the sidewalk fettered by holes and cracks that I have been stepping on to abide with the old proverb that dictates that if a kid steps on a river of nothingness in the pavement, then they can break their mother’s back, and my mother hasn’t been very kind to me lately, so hopefully she’s rotting in Bordeaux with an extremely painful coil in her already shrinking spine this very moment because of my vindictive actions upon the cement that never function but I wish did.

Brendon is absolutely pleasant while I think about breaking my own mother’s back by hopping on cuts in the pavement, a broad grin camping upon his sunny complexion as he swings our hands back and forth by the fingers like an avid child on their way to a museum with their family or just loving life as it is, and I suppose that’s where he is now, even if he knows that we’re all dead at some point, but loving life means that he’s absorbing everything about his surroundings that he can as if he’s never seen it before, and I elect to do the same, because I really haven’t seen it before.

The town looks vaguely familiar, as it is with amnesia, because I once knew this place very well until I chose to kill myself and erase those memories, except it didn’t work, and I was left with this barren wasteland of a mind, but my memory is sluggishly returning to me from its vacation in hell, and this town is less vague than it would have been a month ago, though I recognize that if I’m slowly regaining my memories then I’ll be met with the horrors I put my friends through, but the natural order fucks us all, so I might as well not worry about things when Brendon and I have worked so hard to soothe ourselves.

It’s terribly hot in Nevada, but it’s always hot in Nevada, so that isn’t really a difference. I suppose I’m so acclimated to the temperature in Bordeaux after that one week I spent there and almost got disowned by my parents that I still haven’t adjusted amidst the stress placed on me because of that, but I’m supposed to be taking note of everything, so once again, it is terribly hot in Nevada.

Every bounce of my feet upon the pavement is something that I’ve experienced before, but I cannot place when this occurred, only that it is a personal sensation in the soles of my shoes, all the way up to my bewildered brain whose cognition centers have been on a half time work schedule, and by the looks of it, doesn’t appear that it will begin to operate full time ever again, as I did this to myself, and it’s only following orders that won’t relinquish their totalitarian status for fortuitous qualities, and there’s no use in trying to persuade it.

We’re nearing a dent in the usually continuous strip of buildings, fascinating and screaming to my attention, so I glance into the alleyway tucked within the crater briefly enough to glimpse an apple spraypainted against the wall dripping with moss to elevate the artistry, beautiful and oddly provocative.

And somehow after months of a terrifying haze slitting my vision with no hope for an escape, suddenly there is everything.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: the last chapter woohoo we're out look at this cliffhanger haha I'm mean whatever WHAT VER!!!!11!!1!!i'm suffering
> 
> leave a review of the series in the comments if you want idrc I'm just a comment hoe
> 
> aesthetic: definitely not this book 'cause I hate writing it
> 
> ~Dakota


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